ADVENTURE VIII.
THE FLIGHT OF SHEEMUS.
Next morning Cleg Kelly entered upon his duties. He carried orders to the various publishing offices for about two hundred papers in all. He had often been there before upon his own account, so that the crowd and the rough jocularity were not new to him. But now he practised a kind of austere, aristocratic hauteur. He was not any longer a prowler on the streets, with only a stance for which he might have to fight. He was a newsvendor's assistant. He would not even accept wager of battle upon provocation offered. He could, however, still kick; and as he had an admirable pair of boots with tackety soles an inch thick to do it with, he soon made himself the most respected boy in the crowd.
On returning to the Pleasance, he was admitted through the chink of the door by Mistress Roy, who was comprehensively dressed in a vast yellow flannel bed-gown, which grew murkier and murkier towards her feet. Her hair was tumbling about her eyes. That, too, was of a yellow grey, as though part of the bed-gown had been ravelled out and attached loosely to her head. Feathers and woolly dust were stuck impartially over hair and bed-gown.
"Write the names on the papers as I cry them," she said to Cleg, "and look slippy."
Cleg was quick to obey. He had, in fact, his pencil ready.
"Cready, number seventeen—three stairs back. Dinna write a' that. Write the name, an' mind the rest," said Mistress Roy.
"MacVane, twenty-wan, shop," and so on went the list interminably.
Mistress Roy kept no books, but in her memory she had the various counts and reckonings of all grades of her customers. She retained there, for instance, the exact amounts of the intricate scores of the boys who took in the "Boys of the City." She knew who had not paid for the last chapter of "Ned Kelly; or, the Iron-clad Australian Bushranger." She had a mental gauge on the great roll of black twist tobacco which lay on the counter among old "Evening Scraps." She knew exactly how much there was in the casks of strong waters under the stairs, from which, every Sunday, her numerous friends and callers were largely entertained.
When Cleg went out to deliver his papers he had nearly a hundred calls to make. But such was his sense of locality and his knowledge of the district that, with the help of a butcher's boy of his acquaintance (to whom he promised a reading of the "Desperadoes of New Orleans; or, the Good Ku Klux"), he managed to deliver all—except a single "Scotsman" to one Mackimmon, who lived in a big land at the corner of Rankeillor Street. Him he was utterly unable to discover.