“You were talking of starting at Nagasaki.”
“Ay, Nagasaki’s best.”
“Well, I’ll plank the money,” said Leslie. “I’ll put up a thousand against a thousand of yours.”
M’Gourley stopped and held out a hand sheathed in a mournful-looking black dogskin glove.
“Is’t a bargain?” said he.
“It’s a bargain. Funny that we should have only met the other day in Tokyo, and that you should have come along to Nikko to show me the sights. I believe all the time you were bent on trepanning me into this business.”
“I was that,” said M’Gourley, with charming frankness; “for your own good. A man without a beesiness is a man astray, and when you told me in the hotel in Tokyo you were a boddie with money, and nothing to do with it, I said: ‘Here’s my chance.’”
“If I had met you two months ago,” said Leslie bitterly, “I wouldn’t have been much use, for my father would not have been dead, and I would not have come into his money. Do you know what I have been?—I have been a remittance man.”
“I’ve met vera much worse people than some of them,” said Mac, who if his newly found partner had declared himself a demon out of Hades would perhaps have made the same glossatory remark—the capital being assured.
“I’m hanged if I have,” said Leslie bitterly. “Give me a Sydney Larrikin, a Dago, a Chinee, before your remittance man. I know what I’m talking about for I have been one—see?”