“Look for yourself,” said Huish. “I ain’t wedded to this, if you think I am; I ain’t ambitious; I don’t make a point of playin’ the lead; I offer to, that’s all, and if you can’t show me better, by Gawd, I’m goin’ to!”
“Then the risk!” cried Davis.
“If you ast me straight, I should say it was a case of seven to one, and no takers,” said Huish. “But that’s my look-out, ducky, and I’m gyme. Look at me, Dyvis, there ain’t any shilly-shally about me. I’m gyme, that’s wot I am: gyme all through.”
The captain looked at him. Huish sat there preening his sinister vanity, glorying in his precedency in evil; and the villainous courage and readiness of the creature shone out of him like a candle from a lantern. Dismay and a kind of respect seized hold on Davis in his own despite. Until that moment he had seen the clerk always hanging back, always listless, uninterested, and openly grumbling at a word of anything to do; and now, by the touch of an enchanter’s wand, he beheld him sitting girt and resolved, and his face radiant. He had raised the devil, he thought; and asked who was to control him, and his spirits quailed.
“Look as long as you like,” Huish was going on. “You don’t see any green in my eye! I ain’t afryde of Attwater, I ain’t afryde of you, and I ain’t afryde of words. You want to kill people, that’s wot you want; but you want to do it in kid gloves, and it can’t be done that w’y. Murder ain’t genteel, it ain’t easy, it ain’t safe, and it tykes a man to do it. ’Ere’s the man.”
“Huish!” began the captain with energy; and then stopped, and remained staring at him with corrugated brows.
“Well, hout with it!” said Huish. “’Ave you anythink else to put up? Is there any other chanst to try?”
The captain held his peace.
“There you are then!” said Huish, with a shrug.
Davis fell again to his pacing.