“I tell you it’s Jacob Gray,” reiterated Britton, striking his fist on the table.
“Very well,” roared the butcher, dealing a much louder blow than Britton’s and making the glasses dance again.
“Then I know he’s trembling—groaning with fear. He thinks his last hour is come—I know he does. He suffers now more than as if we were to go up now and cut his throat.”
“Stop a bit,” said the butcher, “always knock creturs on the head afore you cuts their throats—mallet ’em first—always mallet first—it’s so very humane, it is.”
“Come on,” cried Britton; “you, know what you have to do. Follow him closely and surely, and bring me word where he lives. Then we can go to-morrow night, and you may mallet him till he has no head to mallet—hurrah!”
“A d—d fool!” muttered the butcher, as he immersed a considerable portion of his immense red face in the bowl of liquor before him, nor took it out while there was a drain left.
The bar was not half-a-dozen paces from the door of the room in which Andrew Britton and Bond had been sitting, and half drunk as the smith was, he fancied, when he had his hand upon the door, that he heard the scuffling of some one’s feet running away from it. This circumstance raised his ire wonderfully, and the suspicion it gave rise to, that the landlord was playing the spy upon him, nearly choked him with rage.
He paused a moment and glanced towards the bar, but no one was to be seen by the lamp which cast a tolerable light over the many bottles and bright measures there collected. Britton muttered a curse, and was about to pass on towards the staircase, when he saw from the other side of the bar a head slowly rise and then suddenly pop down again.
An exclamation of anger was upon his lips, but he repressed it, and a strong desire to perpetrate some practical joke upon the landlord for his cunning propensities occurred to him. After a few moments’ thought, he returned to the room he had just left, and arming himself with a massive poker, he winked mysteriously at the butcher, who followed him in silent amazement, wondering against whom the powerful weapon was about to be used.
When Britton reached the bar, he placed his finger on his lips, as an invocation to Bond to keep silence, and then he stationed himself with the poker in such a position, that if the head should protrude again, he could by a lateral sweep of the heavy bar of iron, for such if was, make sure of dealing upon it a tolerable rap.