"Oh, I begs your pardon! Only, you see, the dog would have it that you had, and so folks say so as natural as possible; but, howsomdever, I comed by and seed this here dog in the agonies o' conwulsions all along o' pison. Now where I come from, the old man—that's my father as was—had lots o' dogs, and consekewently I knowed somethink about them ere creturs; so I takes up this one and carries him on my back over the way to the stables, and there I cures him and makes a pet of him, and I called him Pison, cos, you see, as he had been pisoned. Lor, sir, you should only have seed him, when he was a getting a little better, how he used to look at me and try to say—'Bill, don't I love you neither!' It's affection—that it is, blow me!"
Todd gave an angry snarl of derision.
"I tell you what it is, my man," he said; "if you will hang that dog, I will give you a guinea."
"Hang Pison? No, old 'un, I'd much rather hang you for half that ere money. Come along, my daffydowndilly. Don't you stay here any more. Why, I do believe it was you as pisoned him, you old bloak."
The ostler seized Hector, or Pison, as he had fresh christened him, round the neck, and fairly dragged him away out of the shop. To be sure, if Hector had resisted, the ostler, with all the power of resistance he possessed, it would indeed have been no easy matter to remove him; but it was wonderful to see how nicely the grateful creature graduated his struggles, so that they fell short of doing the smallest hurt to his preserver, and yet showed how much he wished to remain as a terror and a reproach to Sweeney Todd. When they were both fairly gone, Todd emerged from his parlour again, and the horrible oaths and imprecations he uttered will not bear transcription. With eager haste he again bundled into the cupboard all the things that the dog had dragged out of it, and then stamping his foot, he said—
"Am I, after defeating the vigilance of heaven only knows who, and for so long preserving myself from almost suspicion, to live in dread of a dog? Am I to be tormented with the thought that that fiend of an animal is opposite to me, and ready at any moment to fly over here and chase me out of my own shop. Confound it! I cannot and will not put up with such a state of things. Oh, if I could but get one fair blow at him. Only one fair blow!"
As he spoke he took up a hammer that was in a corner of the shop, and made a swinging movement with it through the air. Some one at that moment opened the shop door, and narrowly escaped a blow upon the head, that would have finished their mortal career.
"Hilloa! Are you mad?"
"Mad!" said Todd.
"Yes: do you knock folks' brains out when they come to be shaved?"