Mr Wilkins, whose eyes had opened very widely as he listened, here started as though he had been electrified. ‘I understand you to imply,’ he said smoothly, ‘that our interests are identical?’
‘Well, I guess they are,’ responded Hold, in the blunt fashion that was natural to him. ‘We both, I suppose, want as many of Sir Sykes Denzil’s yellow coins as we can conjure out of his pocket; and both need no teaching to turn the screw pretty smartly when we see our way to it; eh, mister?’
Enoch Wilkins, gentleman, winced before this over-candid home-thrust. It is indeed one thing to be guilty of a particular act and another to hear it defined with unmannerly plainness of speech. And he did not quite like the being bracketed, as to his motives and position, with a piratical-looking fellow, such as he saw Hold to be. But to take offence was not his cue; so he laughed softly, as at the sallies of some rough humorist, and rattled his watch-guard to and fro, as he warily made answer: ‘All men, I believe, are supposed to take care of Number One. I do not profess to be a bit more disinterested than my neighbours, and if I did, you are too wide awake to believe me.’
‘Right you are!’ responded Richard with a mollified grin and an amicable snap of the ends of his hard fingers. ‘I never cruised in company with a philanderer’ (meaning probably a philanthropist) ‘but once, and he made off with my kit and gold-dust while I was taking my turn down shaft at Flathead Creek, in California there. My notion is that there are pickings for both. Why should we two fall out so long as Sir Sykes Denzil, Baronet, is good for this kind of thing?’ And the ruffian imitated, in expressive pantomime, the action of squeezing a sponge.
Again the lawyer laughed. ‘No need,’ he said with well-feigned admiration for the other’s astuteness, ‘to send your wits to the whetstone, Mr—or perhaps I should say Captain—Hold.’
‘Well, I don’t dislike the handle to my name; and I’ve a fairish right to it, since I’ve had my own cuddy and my own quarter-deck,’ rejoined Hold boastfully. ‘And now, squire, I’d like to hear your views a little more explicit out than I have had the pleasure.’
It was the attorney’s turn to cough now, as he replied, still swaying his watch-guard to and fro: ‘There you push me, my good sir, into a corner. Every profession has its point of honour, you know; and we lawyers are shy of talking over the affairs of an absent client unless’——
‘Client, you call him, do you?’ broke in Hold. ‘Maybe you’re correct there, since you’ve brought the Bart. to throw Pounce and Pontifex overboard, and make you first-officer over his tenants; but he warn’t a client before yesterday.’
The astonishment written in Mr Wilkins’s face was very genuine. Of all the extraordinary confidants whom Sir Sykes could have selected, surely this coarse fierce adventurer was the most unlikely. And yet how, save from Sir Sykes himself, could the fellow have acquired his knowledge of the truth?
‘I was not prepared’—— stammered out the lawyer.