“Webson and Julia Tucker was married at eleven o’clock yesterday morning,” ses Bill Lumm, in a hoarse voice. “When I think of the way I’ve been done, and wot I’ve suffered, I feel ’arf crazy. He won a ’undered pounds through me, and then got the gal I let myself be disgraced for. I ’ad an idea some time ago that he’d got ’is eye on her.”
Ginger Dick didn’t answer ’im a word. He staggered back and braced ’imself up agin the wall for a bit, and arter staring at Bill Lumm in a wild way for pretty near three minutes he crawled back to ’is lodgings and went straight to bed agin.
ODD CHARGES
Seated at his ease in the warm tap-room of the Cauliflower, the stranger had been eating and drinking for some time, apparently unconscious of the presence of the withered ancient who, huddled up in that corner of the settle which was nearer to the fire, fidgeted restlessly with an empty mug and blew with pathetic insistence through a churchwarden pipe which had long been cold. The stranger finished his meal with a sigh of content and then, rising from his chair, crossed over to the settle and, placing his mug on the time-worn table before him, began to fill his pipe.
The old man took a spill from the table and, holding it with trembling fingers to the blaze, gave him a light. The other thanked him, and then, leaning back in his corner of the settle, watched the smoke of his pipe through half-closed eyes, and assented drowsily to the old man’s remarks upon the weather.
“Bad time o’ the year for going about,” said the latter, “though I s’pose if you can eat and drink as much as you want it don’t matter. I s’pose you mightn’t be a conjurer from London, sir?”
The traveller shook his head.
“I was ’oping you might be,” said the old man. The other manifested no curiosity.