Bindle looked at the coin, spat on it, and put it in his pocket.
"Funny thing 'ow a woman'll give a couple o' bob, where a man'll make it 'alf a dollar," he remarked.
"Wot about me?" enquired Tippitt.
"Wot about you, Tippy?" repeated Bindle. "Well, least said soonest mended. You can't 'elp it."
"But I asked 'er," persisted Tippitt.
"Ah! Tippy," remarked Bindle, "it ain't 'im wot asks; but 'im wot gets. 'Owever, you shall 'ave a stone-ginger at the next stoppin' place. Your ole pal ain't goin' back on you, Tippy."
Without a word, Tippitt climbed up into the driver's seat, whilst Bindle clambered on to the tail-board, where he proceeded to fill his pipe with the air of a man for whom time has no meaning.
"Good job they ain't all like me," he muttered. "I likes a day in the country, now and then; but always! Not me." He struck a match, lighted his pipe and, with a sigh of contentment, composed himself to bucolic meditation.
One of the advantages of the moving-profession in Bindle's eyes was that it gave him hours of leisured ease, whilst the goods were in transit. "You can slack it like a Cuthbert," he would say. "All you 'as to do is to sit on the tail of a van an' watch the world go by—some life that."
Bindle was awakened from his contemplation of the hedges and the white road that ribboned out before his eyes by a man coming out of a gate. At the sight of the pantechnicon he grinned and, with a jerk of his thumb, indicated the van as if it were the greatest joke in the world.