'Nor I neither, but you know he's here, and what a devil he is; and we can't help it,' replied Dangerfield, very much tickled.
The clerk only looked through his nearly closed eyes, and with the same pale and surly aspect toward the point to which Dangerfield's casting line had floated, and observed—
'You'll lose them flies, Sir.'
'Hey?' said Dangerfield, and made another cast further into the stream.
'Whatever he may seem, and I think I know him pretty well,' he continued in the same sprightly way, 'Charles Archer would dispose of each of us—you understand—without a scruple, precisely when and how best suited his convenience. Now doctor Sturk has sent him a message which I know will provoke him, for it sounds like a threat. If he reads it so, rely on't, he'll lay Sturk on his back, one way or another, and I'm sorry for him, for I wished him well; but if he will play at brag with the devil I can't help him.'
'I'm a man that holds his tongue; I never talks none, even in my liquor. I'm a peaceable man, and no bully, and only wants to live quiet,' said Irons in a hurry.
'A disciple of my school, you're right, Irons, that's my way; I never name Charles except to the two or three who meet him, and then only when I can't help it, just as you do; fellows of that kidney I always take quietly, and I've prospered. Sturk would do well to reconsider his message. Were I in his shoes, I would not eat an egg or a gooseberry, or drink a glass of fair water from that stream, while he was in the country, for fear of poison! curse him! and to think of Sturk expecting to meet him, and walk with him, after such a message, together, as you and I do here. Do you see that tree?'
It was a stout poplar, just a yard away from Irons's shoulder; and as Dangerfield pronounced the word 'tree,' his hand rose, and the sharp report of a pocket-pistol half-deafened Irons's ear.
'I say,' said Dangerfield, with a startling laugh, observing Irons wince, and speaking as the puff of smoke crossed his face, 'he'd lodge a bullet in the cur's heart, as suddenly as I've shot that tree;' the bullet had hit the stem right in the centre, 'and swear he was going to rob him.'
Irons eyed him with a livid squint, but answered nothing. I think he acquiesced in Dangerfield's dreadful estimate of Charles Archer's character.