"I say we won't shake hands. I'm willing enough that we should part, but as for the shaking hands, I won't do it; and I'm quite willing to pull in to the stairs."
As he spoke he inclined the head of the boat to a little landing-place, where a few wherries were moored.
CHAPTER CLXIII.
ANOTHER POLICE-GALLEY.
"Bill White," said Todd.
"Well, what now?" said the boy, in a sulky tone.
Todd pointed to the pistol, and merely uttered the one word—"Remember!" and then, with a horrible misgiving at his heart, he let the lad pull into the landing-place. Some half-dozen lazy-looking fellows were smoking their pipes upon the dirty beach, and Todd, concealing the pistol within his capacious cuff, sprang on the shore. He turned and looked at the boy, who slowly pushed off, and gained the deep water again.
"He is afraid," thought Todd, "he is afraid, and will be too glad to get away and say nothing."
Bill White's actions were now not a little curious, and they soon attracted the observation of all the idlers on the beach, and put Todd in a perfect agony of apprehension. When the boy was about half a dozen boats' length from the shore, he shipped one of his oars, and then, with his disengaged hand, he lifted from the bottom of the boat an old saucepan, which he held up in an odd, dodging kind of way before his face, with an evident idea that if Todd fired the pistol at him, he could interrupt the bullet in that way. Then, in a loud clear voice, he cried—
"Hilloa! Don't have anything to do with that Mr. Smith. He has been threatening to shoot me, and he has got a pistol in his hand. He's a bad 'un, he is. Take him up! That's the best thing you can do. He's well-nigh as bad as old Todd the murderer of Fleet Street, that they can't catch. Take him up. I advises you. Blaze away, old curmudgeon."
Todd's rage was excessive, but he thought that the best plan would be to try to laugh the thing over, and with a hideous affectation of mirth, he cried out—