“Suppose—” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers.
“Oh!” muttered the Smasher, “blow them fingers of his. I can’t understand ’em—there!” The left-handed Hercules knew that this was to attack the detective on his tenderest point. “Blest if I ever knows his p’s from his b’s, or his w’s from his x’s, let alone his vowels, and them would puzzle a conjuror.”
Mr. Peters glanced at the prizefighter more in sorrow than in anger, and taking out a greasy little pocketbook, and a greasier little pencil, considerably the worse for having been vehemently chewed in moments of preoccupation, he wrote upon a leaf of it thus—“Suppose we catch him today?”
“Ah, very true,” said the Smasher sulkily, after he had examined the document in two or three different lights before he came upon its full bearings; “very true, indeed, suppose we do—and suppose we don’t, on the other hand; and I know which is the likeliest. Suppose, Mr. Peters, we give up lookin’ for a needle in a bundle of hay, which after a time gets tryin’ to a lively disposition, and go back to our businesses. If you had a girl as didn’t know British from best French a-servin’ of your customers,” he continued in an injured tone, “you’d be anxious to get home, and let your forring counts go to the devil their own ways.”
“Then go,” Mr. Peters wrote, in large letters and no capitals.
“Oh, ah; yes, to be sure,” replied the Smasher, who, I regret to say, felt painfully, in his absence from domestic pleasures, the want of somebody to quarrel with; “No, I thank you! Go the very day as you’re going to catch him! Not if I’m in any manner aware of the circumstance. I’m obliged to you,” he added, with satirical emphasis.
“Come, I say, old boy,” interposed Gus, who had been quietly doing execution upon a plate of devilled kidneys during this little friendly altercation, “come, I say, no snarling, Smasher, Peters isn’t going to contest the belt with you, you know.”
“You needn’t be a-diggin’ at me because I ain’t champion,” said the ornament of the P.R., who was inclined to find a malicious meaning in every word uttered that morning; “you needn’t come any of your sneers because I ain’t got the belt any longer.”
The Smasher had been Champion of England in his youth, but had retired upon his laurels for many years, and only occasionally emerged from private life in a public-house to take a round or two with some old opponent.
“I tell you what it is, Smasher—it’s my opinion the air of Liverpool don’t suit your constitution,” said Gus. “We’ve promised to stand by Peters here, and to go by his word in everything, for the sake of the man we want to serve; and, however trying it may be to our patience doing nothing, which perhaps is about as much as we can do and make no mistakes, the first that gets tired and deserts the ship will be no friend to Richard Marwood.”
“I’m a bad lot, Mr. Darley, and that’s the truth,” said the mollified Smasher; “but the fact is, I’m used to a turn with the gloves every morning before breakfast with the barman, and when I don’t get it, I dare say I ain’t the pleasantest company goin’. I should think they’ve got gloves in the house: would you mind taking off your coat and having a turn—friendly like?”
Gus assured the Smasher that nothing would please him better than that trifling diversion; and in five minutes they had pushed Mr. Peters and the breakfast-table into a corner, and were hard at it, Mr. Darley’s knowledge of the art being all required to keep the slightest pace with the scientific movements of the agile though elderly Smasher.
Mr. Peters did not stay at the breakfast-table long, but after having drunk a huge breakfast cupful of very opaque and substantial-looking coffee at a draught, just as if it had been half a pint of beer, he slid quietly out of the room.
“It’s my opinion,” said the Smasher, as he stood, or rather lounged, upon his guard, and warded off the most elaborate combinations of Mr. Darley’s fists with as much ease as he would have brushed aside so many flies—“it’s my opinion that chap ain’t up to his business.”
“Isn’t he?” replied Gus, as he threw down the gloves in despair, after having been half an hour in a violent perspiration, without having succeeded in so much as rumpling the Smasher’s hair. “Isn’t he?” he said, choosing the interrogative as the most expressive form of speech. “That man’s got head enough to be prime minister, and carry the House along with every twist of his fingers.”
“He must make his p’s and b’s a little plainer afore he’ll get a bill through the Commons though,” muttered the Left-handed one, who couldn’t quite get over his feelings of injury against the detective for the utter darkness in which he had been kept for the last three days as to the other’s plans.
The Smasher and Mr. Darley passed the morning in that remarkably intellectual and praiseworthy manner peculiar to gentlemen who, being thrown out of their usual occupation, are cast upon their own resources for amusement and employment. There was the daily paper to be looked at, to begin with; but after Gus had glanced at the leading article, a rifacimento of the Times leader of the day before, garnished with some local allusions, and highly spiced with satirical remarks apropos to our spirited contemporary the Liverpool Aristides; after the Smasher had looked at the racing fixtures for the coming week, and made rude observations on the editing of a journal which failed to describe the coming off of the event between Silver-polled Robert and the Chester Crusher—after, I say, the two gentlemen
