"I should say, Bill, that your best chance would be to try and get work either in a brickfield or with a market-gardener. At any rate we should be able to get a talk for half an hour in the evening. I was always done at nine o'clock, and if we were both in work we could take a room together."
Bill shook his head.
"That would be wery nice, but I couldn't have it, George. I knows as I aint fit company for yer, and if yer was with a shop-keeping bloke he would think yer was going to run off with the money if he knew yer kept company with a chap like me. No, the 'greement must be as yer goes yer ways and I goes mine; but I hopes as yer will find suffin to do up here, not 'cause as I wouldn't like to go down to this place of yourn, but because yer have set yer heart on getting work here."
A week later the two boys were out late in Covent Garden trying to earn a few pence by fetching up cabs and carriages for people coming out from a concert in the floral hall. George had just succeeded in earning threepence, and had returned to the entrance to the hall, and was watching the people come out, and trying to get another job. Presently a gentleman, with a girl of some nine or ten years old, came out and took their place on the footpath.
"Can I call you a carriage, sir?" George asked.
"No, thank you, lad, a man has gone for it."
George fell back and stood watching the girl, who was in a white dress, with a little hood trimmed with swansdown over her head.
Presently his eye fell on something on which the light glittered as it hung from her neck. Just as he was looking a hand reached over her shoulder, there was a jerk, and a sudden cry from the child, then a boy dived into the crowd, and at the same moment George dashed after him. There was a cry of "Stop, thief!" and several hands made a grab at George as he dived through the crowd; but he slipped through them and was soon in the roadway.
Some twenty yards ahead of him he saw the boy running. He turned up Bow Street and then dashed down an alley. He did not know that he was followed until suddenly George sprang upon his back, and the two fell with a crash, the young thief undermost. George seized his right hand, and kneeling upon him, twisted it behind his back and forced him to open his fingers, the boy, taken by surprise, and not knowing who was his assailant, making but slight resistance.
George seized the gold locket and dashed back at full speed into the market, and was soon in the thick of the crowd round the entrance. The gentleman was standing talking to a policeman, who was taking a note of the description of the lost trinket. The girl was standing by crying.