'Captain Sarrasin! Mrs. Sarrasin! Where have you turned up from? Tell me—have you really been benignly shadowing me all this way?' Ericson asked with a smile. 'There isn't the slightest danger, I can assure you. This man merely asked me a civil question.'
The civil man, meanwhile, was wrestling and wriggling under Sarrasin's grip. He was wrestling and wriggling all in vain.
'You let me go,' the man exclaimed, in a tone of righteous indignation. 'You hain't nothin' to do with me.'
'I must first see what you have got there in your hand,' Sarrasin said. 'See—there it is! Look here, your Excellency—look at that knife!'
Sarrasin took from the man's hand a short, one-bladed, delicately-shaped, and terrible knife. It might be trusted to pierce its way at a single touch, not to say stroke, into the heart of any victim.
'That's the knife I use at my trade,' the man exclaimed indignantly. 'I am a ladies' slipper-maker, and that's the knife I use for cutting into the leathers, because it cuts clean, don't you see, and makes no waste. Lord bless you, governor, what a notion you have got into your 'ead! I shall amuse my old woman when I tell her.'
'Why did you have the knife in your hand?' Sarrasin sternly asked.
'Took it out, governor, jest by chance when I was taking put the letter.'
'You don't carry a knife like that open in your pocket,' Sarrasin said sternly. 'It closes up, I suppose, or else you have a sheath for it. Oh, yes, I see the spring—it closes this way and I think I have seen this pretty sort of weapon before. Well, look here, you don't carry that sort of toy open in your pocket, you know. How did it come open?'
'Blest if I know, governor—you are all a-puzzlin' of me.'