"For doing what?" said I.
The man paused a moment, looked around him, eyed me furtively, and finally loosened his cravat with a hasty pull. "You 're the coroner," said he.
"I! What do you mean?"
"Yes, you,—the coroner, don't you understand?" and so saying he shoved the gold pieces towards me.
"Very good," said I, "we will suppose I 'm the coroner."
"And being the coroner," said he, "you get this note, which requests you to call at No. 9 Blank Street to examine the body of a young man which is supposed—only supposed, you see—to have—well, to have died under suspicious circumstances."
"Go on," said I.
"No," he returned, "not till I know how you like it. Stagers and another knows it; and it would n't be very safe for you to split, besides not making nothing out of it; but what I say is this. Do you like the business of coroner?"
Now I did not like it, but two hundred in gold was life to me just then; so I said, "Let me hear the whole of it first."
"That 's square enough," said the man; "my wife 's got"—correcting himself with a little shiver—"my wife had a brother that 's been cuttin' up rough, because, when I 'd been up too late, I handled her a leetle hard now and again. About three weeks ago, he threatened to fetch the police on me for one or two little things Stagers and I done together. Luckily, he fell sick with a typhoid just then; but he made such a thunderin' noise about opening safes, and what he done, and I done, and so on, that I did n't dare to have any one about him. When he began to mend, I gave him a little plain talk about this business of threatening to bring the police on us, and next day I caught him a saying something to my wife about it. The end of it was, he was took worse next morning, and—well he died yesterday. Now what does his sister do, but writes a note, and gives it to a boy in the alley to put in the post. Luckily, Stagers happened to be round; and after the boy got away a bit, Bill bribes him with a quarter to give him the note, which was n't no less than a request to the coroner to come to our house to-morrow and make an examination, as foul play was suspected."