“Pity poor old Jacob Wood didn’t come to you, doctor.”
“It’s a pity he did not,” I said. “Let me see, you are a warehouseman, are you not?”
“Yee, sir, I work up in one of the great Tooley Street warehouses, seven stories above the ground, and everywhere around me wool—bales upon bales of wool which we crane up from waggons or lighters and in at an open door, where, if a fellow had had a little drop too much and slipped—well, seven stories would be an awful fall.
“Ours is a place worth going over, sir. There’s floors upon floors beneath, stored with jute and dye-woods, teas, coffees, spices, tobaccos, and lowest of all on the ground floor and in the cellarage, tallows in great hogsheads. Ah, it’s a busy place, and the stores there is worth some money, and no mistake.
“I remember Jacob Wood doctor,” he said, drawing in a long breath as if of pain, “and no wonder; but it’s strange, how very little people see danger when it’s coming to them.
“I was at our warehouse one day, and had been down for half-a-pint, when, ‘What’s the matter with Jacob Wood this afternoon?’ says one of the men.
“But, excepting that he looked a little wild about the eyes, I didn’t see anything more about him than might often be seen in men who will drink heavily at times; and so I said. But at last, towards evening, when I was longing to get away home to spend my evening comfortably, I was left alone upon that floor with him, and felt a bit startled to see him go all at once to the open door where the crane landed the bales, and cut some strange capers, like a man going to dive off a board into the sea.
“Putting down my work, which was getting ready two or three burst bales for the hydraulic press, so that they might be tied up again, I slipped quietly up behind him, and laid my hand upon his shoulder, when, with a yell, he shrieked out.
“And the next moment, by the light of the gas on that foggy winter’s afternoon, we two were wrestling and fighting together, within a few feet of the door, out of which we should have fallen clear a hundred feet upon the stones of the wharf below.
“I should have shouted, but all power of speech seemed taken away, as locked together we wrestled here and there, while his hot breath hissed against my cheek, and I could look close into his wild, glowering eyes as, flushing with rage, he bore me nearer and nearer to the doorway.