The Dutch bar-keeper leaned across the counter, and tapped him on the arm with a thick, stubby forefinger.
"Mister Engelschman, I think you shall best go out of here."
"Me? Go out? 'Oo are you gettin' at, Myn'eer Van Dunck?" swaggered W. Keyse. And he slipped one thin, freckled hand ostentatiously under his coat of shoddy summer tweed. A very cheap revolver lurked in the hip-pocket of which Billy was so proud. In his third-floor back bed-sitting-room in Judd Street, London, W.C., he had promised himself a moment when that hip-pocket should be referred to, just in that way. It was a cheap bit of theatrical swagger, but the saloon was full, not of harmless theatrical pretences, but bitter racial antagonisms, seething animosities, fanged and venomed hatreds, only waiting the prearranged signal to strike and slay.
Emigration Jane tugged at the hero's sleeve, as he felt for an almost invisible moustache, scanning the piled-up, serried faces with pert, pale, hardy eyes.
"'E ain't coddin'. See 'ow black they're lookin'."
"I see 'em, plyne enough. Waxworks only fit for the Chamber of 'Orrors, ain't 'em?"
"It's a young woman wot arsks you to go, not a bloke! Please! For my syke, if you won't for your own!"
Billy Keyse, with a flourish, offered the thin, boyish arm in the tweed sleeve.
"Righto! Will you allow me, Miss?"
She faltered: