“There, there, that will do. Let me hear no more of it,” said Britton. “Come in.”
Gray hesitated a moment, and Britton, bending his brows upon him, said,—
“Why, you are as safe in the Chequers at Westminster, as you were at the Old Smithy at Learmont. Why do you shrink, man? You know, and I make no secret of it, that I would as soon dash out your brains as look at you, if I could do so with safety. Come in, I say.”
“I am quite sure,” muttered Gray, “I may depend upon such an old friend as Britton.”
He followed Britton as he spoke, and the smith, crossing the bar, ascended two flights of stairs to his own sleeping room, into which he ushered Jacob Gray.
“I have company down stairs, and be cursed to them,” he said. “Wait here till I come back to you.”
“You—you won’t be long, Britton?”
“But five minutes.”
Britton left the room, and after proceeding down about three stairs, he came back and, to Gray’s dismay, locked the door of the room.
“So—so,” murmured Gray, playing his fingers nervously upon the back of a chair. “Here I am hunted through Westminster, and forced at length to take refuge with Andrew Britton—he who has avowedly sought my life, and would take it now, but for fear of my confession. Have I ever been in such desperate straits as this before? Yes—yes—I have, and yet escaped. Surely he will not kill me. He dare not. Yet he drinks largely, and may remember then his revenge, and hatred against me, while he forgets his own safety. Oh, if Andrew Britton knew how safe it was to murder Jacob Gray, I should never see another sunrise. I am in most imminent danger—very imminent danger, indeed, and locked in too. What will become of me? What have toiled for, what committed crime upon crime for, what dipped my hands in blood for, if I am to be hunted thus, impoverished, and a price to be set upon my head?”