“Perhaps you’re sorry for me,” I went on, like the idiot I was, “and would like to convert me, and feel ready to tell me, how much better it would be for me if I was a convict in irons, how it would give me time to think of my sinful ways. But it won’t do, Ninety-seven. Arthur Rowan knows your sort by heart, so no more humbug with me.”
“Serve yer right,” said one of the gang, who had been looking on—an ugly ruffian of a fellow, named Bird, who was going out for fourteen years for housebreaking. “You’re always on the pious lay. I told yer it wouldn’t do. Give it him again, sir. He’s a reg’lar snivelling humbug, that’s what he is.”
“Keep your tongue between your teeth,” I said sharply, as I fixed my gentleman with my eye. “Who spoke to you?”
He gave his lips a slap, and stared at me as hard as I stared at him, giving me a nasty ugly look which seemed to say, “Oh! if I had the chance!” But I looked him down, and his thick eyelids went slowly over his vicious eyes, as he turned away; and after an order or two I went out and along the tower deck to where the sentry stood on duty, one of the several always ready with loaded musket and fixed bayonet, and he laughed at me.
“Been giving it to ’em hot?”
“Yes,” I said, “it makes me sick when I get hold of a sanctimonious humbug pretending to be so innocent and good. That’s the worst kind of black I know.”
“They’re a nice lot.”
“Deal you know about it,” I growled.
“Don’t be huffy, mate,” he said.
“Enough to make any man huffy. It’s all very well for you swaddies just idling on sentry-go, but you’re too big to have much to do with the convicts. It would be degrading the scarlet cloth, but it isn’t too hard for us warder guards. Wish I’d taken to crossing sweeping, or some other respectable profession before I took to looking after gaol sweepings.”