'I tell you what it is, Slicer,' said one whose voice I had not yet heard, 'if so be this gentleman's a friend of Long Bob, you just let him alone, I say.'
I opened my eyes now, and saw before me a tall rather slender man in a big loose dress-coat, to whom Slicer had turned with the words,
'You say! Ha! ha! Well, I say—There's my Scotch haddock! who'll touch him?'
'I'll take him home,' said the tall man, advancing towards me. I made an attempt to rise. But I grew deadly ill, fell back, and remember nothing more.
When I came to myself I was lying on a bed in a miserable place. A middle-aged woman of degraded countenance, but kindly eyes, was putting something to my mouth with a teaspoon: I knew it by the smell to be gin. But I could not yet move. They began to talk about me, and I lay and listened. Indeed, while I listened, I lost for a time all inclination to get up, I was so much interested in what I heard.
'He's comin' to hisself,' said the woman. 'He'll be all right by and by. I wonder what brings the likes of him into the likes of this place. It must look a kind of hell to them gentle-folks, though we manage to live and die in it.'
'I suppose,' said another, 'he's come on some of Mr. Falconer's business.'
'That's why Job's took him in charge. They say he was after somebody or other, they think.—No friend of Mr. Falconer's would be after another for any mischief,' said my hostess.
'But who is this Mr. Falconer?—Is Long Bob and he both the same alias?' asked a third.
'Why, Bessy, ain't you no better than that damned Slicer, who ought to ha' been hung up to dry this many a year? But to be sure you 'ain't been long in our quarter. Why, every child hereabouts knows Mr. Falconer. Ask Bobby there.'