Thunderstruck, Calendar glanced hastily in the indicated direction. A blue-coated bobby was to be seen approaching with measured stride, diffusing upon the still evening air an impression of ineffably capable self-contentment.
Calendar's fleshy lips parted and closed without a sound. They quivered. Beneath them quivered his assortment of graduated chins. His heavy and pendulous cheeks quivered, slowly empurpling with the dark tide of his apoplectic wrath. The close-clipped thatch of his iron gray mustache, even, seemed to bristle like hairs upon the neck of a maddened dog. Beneath him his fat legs trembled, and indeed his whole huge carcass shook visibly, in the stress of his restrained wrath.
Suddenly, overwhelmed, he banged the gate behind him and waddled off to join the captain; who already, with praiseworthy native prudence, had fallen back upon their cab.
From his coign of strategic advantage, the comfortable elevation of his box, Kirkwood's cabby, whose huge enjoyment of the adventurers' discomfiture had throughout been noisily demonstrative, entreated Calendar with lifted forefinger, bland affability, and expressions of heartfelt sympathy.
"Kebsir? 'Ave a kebsir, do! Try a ride be'ind a real 'orse, sir; don't you go on wastin' time on 'im." A jerk of a derisive thumb singled out the other cabman. "'E aren't pl'yin' you fair, sir; I knows 'im,—'e's a hartful g'y deceiver, 'e is. Look at 'is 'orse,—w'ich it aren't; it's a snyle, that's w'at it is. Tyke a father's hadvice, sir, and next time yer fairest darter runs awye with the dook in disguise, chyse 'em in a real kebsir, not a cheap imitashin.... Kebsir?... Garn, you 'ard-'arted—"
Here he swooped upwards in a dizzy flight of vituperation best unrecorded. Calendar, beyond an absent-minded flirt of one hand by his ear, as who should shoo away a buzzing insect, ignored him utterly.
Sullenly extracting money from his pocket, he paid off his driver, and in company with Stryker, trudged in morose silence down the street.
Brentwick touched Kirkwood's arm and drew him into the house.