"Ho!" he exclaimed. "Better times arrived, eh? 'Ad a spring-cleaning, 'aven't you? Telephone, too, and new chairs! Golly! Does it run to cigars?"
Aaron Rodd shamelessly offered him a box of Harvey Grimm's Cabanas. His client bit off the end of one with relish and seemed inclined to swallow it. He eventually spat it out, however, lit the cigar, and, throwing himself back in a chair, crossed his rather pudgy legs.
"Know anything about maritime law?" he began.
"Not much," Aaron Rodd admitted. "A lawyer very seldom knows anything outside his little bent," he went on. "We have great rows of books properly indexed, turn up the point and read the decisions."
"Where are your'n?" Mr. Jacob Potts enquired, looking around the somewhat bare walls.
"Pawned," Aaron Rodd confessed. "All the same, I can go into the law library and give you an answer on any point you like to put forward, within a very few minutes."
Mr. Potts nodded.
"That's why I kind of took a fancy to you years ago, when you was a nipper," he confessed. "No doubling and twisting about you. Just a straightforward answer to a straightforward question. 'Do you know anything about maritime law?' sez I. 'No,' sez you, 'but I can find out.' And so you can. Now, one of the regular kidney of you fellows'd have been messing about for half an hour and then have read it all out of a book. You never tumbled to it yet, guv'nor, did you, what my new line of business was?"
"Never," Aaron Rodd acknowledged. "From your conversation at various times I gathered that you saved money in the ring, acquired a prosperous public-house property, and were in some way or other responsible for the organisation of labour in your neighbourhood."
Mr. Jacob Potts grinned.