"Everything the Bible says is true," said I. "But there're heaps of true sayings, you know, that aren't in it at all."
"Well," says the owner, "you slip out to yon Zoo and you put it up to yon one-armed Hindu that a white Noah named Bower has been ordered to carry pairs of all the Indian fauna from Singapore to Sydney; and you tell him to shake his black panther and 'come along with.'"
"What will you pay?" I asked.
The owner winked his eye. "What will I promise?" said he. "I leave that to you."
But I wasn't bluffed. The owner always talked pagan and practised Christian; loved his little joke. They called him "Bond" Hadley on the water-front to remind themselves that his word was just as good.
I settled with Yir Massir in a long confab back of the snake-house, and that night Hadley blew me to Ivy Green's benefit at the opera-house.
Poor little girl! There weren't fifty in the audience. She couldn't act. I mean she couldn't draw. The whole company was on the bum and stone-broke. They'd scraped out of Australia and the Sandwich Islands, but it looked as if they'd stay in Calcutta, doing good works, such as mending roads for the public, to the end of time.
"Ivy Green is a pretty name for a girl," said the owner.
"And Ivy Green is a pretty girl," I said; "and I'll bet my horned soul she's a good girl."