"They've got to do something pretty desperate first, I fancy," whispered Uvo, with a gleam in his sunken eyes. He had not denied the fact. I felt encouraged to elaborate my grievance against Edgar Nettleton.
"Besides, I had his banker's reference. That was all right; yet we had trouble to get our very first rent, more trouble over the second, and this time there's going to be a devil of a row. I shouldn't wonder if Nettleton had a bill of sale over every stick. I know he's owing all the tradesmen. He may be a very clever chap, and all that, but I can't help saying that he strikes me as a bit of a wrong 'un, Uvo."
Of course I had not started with the intention of saying quite so much. But the brunt of the unpleasantness was falling on my shoulders; and the fellow had made friends with my friend, whose shoes he was not fit to black. Uvo, moreover, was still according me a patient, interested hearing, as he lay like a bright-eyed log in his bed at the top of No. 7. Altogether it was not in my allowance of human nature to lose such an opportunity of showing him his new friend in his true colours.
"He is clever," whispered Uvo, as though that was the bond between them. "He knows something about everything, and he's a wonderful carpenter and mechanic. You must really see the burglar-trap that he concocted after the scare. If another Cheffins paid him a visit, he'd put his foot in it with a vengeance."
"It would be six of one and very nearly half a dozen of the other," said I with hardihood. "Set a Nettleton to catch a Cheffins, as you might say, Uvo!"
But he only smiled, as though he would not have hesitated to say it in fun. "Of course you're only joking, Gilly, but I could quite understand it if you weren't. There's no vice in old Nettleton, let alone crime; but there's a chuckle-headed irresponsibility that might almost let him in for either before he knew it. He never does seem to know what he's doing, and I'm sure he never worries about anything he's once done. If he did, he'd have gone further afield from the scene of his downfall, or else taken rooms in town instead of a red elephant of a house that he evidently can't afford. As a tenant, I quite agree that he is hopeless."
"If only he hadn't come here!" I grumbled. "What on earth can have brought him to Witching Hill, of all places?"
Uvo's eyes were dancing in the light of the reading gas-lamp, with the smelly tube, which had been connected up with his bedroom bracket.
"Of course," he whispered, "you wouldn't admit for a moment that it might be the call of the soil, and all there's in it, Gilly?"
"No, I wouldn't; but I'll tell you one thing," I exclaimed, as it struck me for the first time: "the man you describe is not the man to trust with all those morbid superstitions of yours! I know he enters into them, because you told me he did, and I know how much you wanted to find some one who would. But so much the worse for you both, if he's the kind you say he is. An idle man, too, and apparently alone in the world! I don't envy you if Nettleton really does come under the influence of your old man of the soil, and plays down to him!"