“Mr. Parry,” replied Anderton.
“H’m. How do you spell it. I never heard such a name,” he grumbled.
This made me very angry, and I retorted, in much the same tone: “Of course you’ve heard it constantly. I’ve seen your name in the law reports with my father’s, Serjeant Parry, many a time.”
Crompton Hutton rose in his chair and spread out his arms as though he was going to hug me.
“What, are you a son of the dear old Serjeant? Really, now. And what are you doing in these God-forsaken parts? Sit down. Delighted.” And he wrung me by the hand in the most friendly fashion.
The case was about a milk float and a lurry. I was for the lurry, and we won, mainly, as far as I remember, because an imaginative office boy of Anderton’s had drawn his client’s milk float galloping
up the road on the wrong side of the way with the driver waving his whip, and Crompton Hutton regarded it as a conclusive admission of facts.
Anderton was a big, heavy, red-faced man of the elder Weller type, and quite as kind-hearted and straightforward. As we walked across to the Derby Arms for some lunch when the case was over:—
“I tell you what it is,” he said to me, “you’ll do very well with Crumpy, but you’ll have to do what he tells you.”
“About what?” I asked.