“Just one query I should like to ask first,” interposed the carpenter, holding up his left hand with a dim remembrance of school etiquette. “What time was all this?”
“Six o’clock, as near as I can remember,” snapped Mrs. Rastin.
“Six o’clock in the morning?” asked the carpenter, writing.
“No, pudden head,” said Mrs. Rastin, contemptuously. “Six o’clock in the evening. Why don’t you buy a new pair of ears and give another twopence this time and get a good—All right, sir.” To the coroner. “I’ll answer your question with pleasure. I know when I’m speaking to gentlemen, and I know when I’m talking to pigs.” Mrs. Rastin glanced triumphantly at the carpenter, and the carpenter looked appealingly at his unsympathetic colleagues in search of support. “We was standing on the kerb as I might be ’ere. Over there, as it might be, where the young man in glasses is that’s connected with the newspaper, was a barrer with sweetstuff. ‘Oh!’ she says all at once, ‘I must get some toffee,’ she says, ‘for my little boy ’gainst he comes ’ome,’ she says. With that, and before I could so much as open me mouth to say ‘Mind out!’ the poor deer was ’alf way across the road; the ’bus was on her and down she went. I cuts across to her”—Mrs. Rastin wept, and Bobbie could hear responsive sobs from the women near him—“I cuts across to her, and she says. ‘I—I never got the sweets for him,’ she says. Thinking of her—of her little boy right at the last; you understand me, sir! And the constable off with his cape and put it under her ’ead, and she just turned, and,” Mrs. Rastin wept bitterly, “and it was all over.” Mrs. Rastin patted her eyes with a deplorable handkerchief. “‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I never got them sweets—’”
“Pardon me!” said the carpenter. “Did you make a note of them words at the time? What I mean to say is, did you write ’em down on paper?”
“Not being,” said Mrs. Rastin, swallowing, her head shivering with contempt, and speaking with great elaboration, “not being a clever juggins with a miserable twopenny ’apenny business as joiner and carpenter in ’Oxton Street, and paying about a penny in the pound, if that, I did not write them words down on paper.”
“Ho!” said the carpenter, defiantly. “Then you ought to ’ave.”
Mrs. Rastin was allowed to back from the end of the table and to take a privileged seat on a form where she had for company the witnesses who had already given evidence. These were an anxious ’bus driver, a constable of the G Division, and a young doctor from the hospital. The sergeant went hunting again in the crowd, and this time captured what appeared to be a small girl, but proved to be a tiny specimen of a mature woman. Bobbie Lancaster, dodging to get a sight of her, chuckled as he recognized Miss Threepenny (so called from some fancied resemblance to that miniature coin), a little person whom he had not infrequently derided and chased.
“I really don’t know that we want any more evidence, sergeant,” remarked the coroner. “What do you say, gentlemen?”
Eleven of the gentlemen replied that they had had ample; the carpenter waited until they had stated this, and then decided that the little woman’s evidence should be heard. Miss Threepenny, stepping on tiptoe, her hands folded on the handle of a rib-broken umbrella that was for her absurdly long, explained that she saw the accident, being then on her way home from her work at a theatrical costumier’s in Tabernacle Street.