“The peddler,” said the other, glancing a look at the signpost. “I made Hollister put a stage so high that the neck would not be dislocated by the fall, and I intend making as handsome a skeleton of him as there is in the states of North America; the fellow has good points, and his bones are well knit. I will make a perfect beauty of him. I have long been wanting something of this sort to send as a present to my old aunt in Virginia, who was so kind to me when a boy.”
“The devil!” cried Lawton. “Would you send the old woman a dead man’s bones?”
“Why not?” said the surgeon. “What nobler object is there in nature than the figure of a man—and the skeleton may be called his elementary parts. But what has been done with the body?”
“Off too.”
“Off! And who has dared to interfere with my perquisites?”
“Sure, jist the divil,” said Betty; “and who’ll be taking yeerself away some of these times too, without asking yeer lave.”
“Silence, you witch!” said Lawton, with difficulty suppressing a laugh.
“Is this the manner in which to address an officer?”
“Who called me the filthy Elizabeth Flanagan?” cried the washerwoman, snapping her fingers contemptuously. “I can remimber a frind for a year and don’t forgit an inimy for a month.”
But the friendship or enmity of Mrs. Flanagan was alike indifferent to the surgeon, who could think of nothing but his loss; and Lawton was obliged to explain to his friend the apparent manner in which it had happened.
“And a lucky escape it was for ye, my jewel of a doctor,” cried Betty, as the captain concluded. “Sargeant Hollister, who saw him face to face, as it might be, says it’s Beelzeboob, and no piddler, unless it may be in a small matter of lies and thefts, and sich wickedness. Now a pretty figure ye would have been in cutting up Beelzeboob, if the major had hanged him. I don’t think it’s very ’asy he would have been under yeer knife.”