"You can leave your friends, though," said Oliver, with a half-smile, "and let them be punished for what you did."
"That," rejoined the Dodger, with a wave of his pipe,—"that was all out of consideration for Fagin, 'cause the traps know that we work together, and he might have got into trouble if we hadn't made our lucky; that was the move, wasn't it, Charley?"
Master Bates nodded assent, and would have spoken, but that the recollection of Oliver's flight came so suddenly upon him, that the smoke he was inhaling got entangled with a laugh, and went up into his head, and down into his throat, and brought on a fit of coughing and stamping about five minutes long.
"Look here!" said the Dodger, drawing forth a handful of shillings and halfpence. "Here's a jolly life! what's the odds where it comes from? Here, catch hold; there's plenty more where they were took from. You won't, won't you? oh, you precious flat!"
"It's naughty, ain't it, Oliver?" inquired Charley Bates. "He'll come to be scragged, won't he?"
"I don't know what that means," replied Oliver, looking round.
"Something in this way, old feller," said Charley. As he said it, Master Bates caught up an end of his neckerchief, and, holding it erect in the air, dropped his head on his shoulder, and jerked a curious sound through his teeth, thereby indicating, by a lively pantomimic representation that scragging and hanging were one and the same thing.
"That's what it means," said Charley. "Look how he stares, Jack; I never did see such prime company as that 'ere boy; he'll be the death of me, I know he will." And Master Charles Bates having laughed heartily again, resumed his pipe with tears in his eyes.
"You've been brought up bad," said the Dodger, surveying his boots with much satisfaction when Oliver had polished them. "Fagin will make something of you, though; or you'll be the first he ever had that turned out unprofitable. You'd better begin at once, for you'll come to the trade long before you think of it, and you're only losing time, Oliver."
Master Bates backed this advice with sundry moral admonitions of his own, which being exhausted, he and his friend Mr. Dawkins launched into a glowing description of the numerous pleasures incidental to the life they led, interspersed with a variety of hints to Oliver that the best thing he could do, would be to secure Fagin's favour without more delay by the same means which they had employed to gain it.