won’t budge,” he cried at last. “Just run into the Hit or Miss at the corner, mate, and borrow a hammer; and you might get a pint o’ hot beer when ye’re at it. Here’s fourpence. I was with three that found a quid in the Mac,1 end of last week; here’s the last of it.”
He fumbled in his pocket, but his hands were so numb that he could scarcely capture the nimble fourpence. Why should the “nimble fourpence” have the monopoly of agility?
“I’m Blue Ribbon, Tommy, don’t yer know,” said Bill, with regretful sullenness. His ragged great-coat, indeed, was decorated with the azure badge of avowed and total abstinence.
“Blow yer blue ribbon! Hold on where ye are, and I’ll bring the bloomin’ hammer myself.”
Thus growling, Tommy strode indifferent through the snow, his legs protected by bandages of straw ropes. Presently he reappeared in the warmer yellow of the light that poured through the windows of the old public-house. He was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, which he then thrust into the deeps of his pockets, hugging a hammer to his body under his armpit.
“A little hot beer would do yer bloomin’ temper a deal more good than ten yards o’ blue ribbon at sixpence. Blue ruin’s more in my line,” observed Thomas, epigram-matically, much comforted by his refreshment. Aid with two well-directed taps he knocked the pins out of their sockets, and let down the backboard of the cart.
Bill, uncomforted by ale, sulkily jerked the horses forward; the cart was tilted up, and the snow tumbled out, partly into the shallow shore-water, partly on to the edge of the slope.
“Ullo!” cried Tommy suddenly. “E’re’s an old coat-sleeve a sticking out o’ the snow.”
“‘Alves!” exclaimed Bill, with a noble eye on the main chance.
“‘Alves! of course, ‘alves. Ain’t we on the same lay,” replied the chivalrous Tommy. Then he cried, “Lord preserve us, mate; there’s a cove in the coat!”
He ran forward, and clutched the elbow of the sleeve which stood up stiffly above the frozen mound of lumpy snow. He might well have thought at first that the sleeve was empty, such a very stick of bone and skin was the arm he grasped within it.
“Here, Bill, help us to dig him out, poor chap!”
“Is he dead?” asked Bill, leaving the horses’ heads.
“Dead! he’s bound to be dead, under all that weight. But how the dickens did he get into the cart? Guess we didn’t shovel him in, eh; we’d have seen him?”
By this time the two men had dragged a meagre corpse out of the snow heap. A rough worn old pilot-coat, a shabby pair of corduroy trousers, and two broken boots through which the toes could be seen peeping ruefully, were all the visible raiment of the body. The clothes lay in heavy swathes and folds over the miserable bag of bones that had once been a tall man. The peaked blue face was half hidden by a fell of iron-gray hair, and a grizzled beard hung over the breast.
The two men stood for some moments staring at the corpse. A wretched woman in a thin gray cotton dress had come down from the bridge, and shivered beside the body for a moment.
“He’s a goner,” was her criticism. “I wish I was.”
With this aspiration she shivered back into the fog again, walking on her unknown way. By this time a dozen people had started up from nowhere, and were standing in a tight ring round the body. The behavior of the people was typical of London gazers. No one made any remark, or offered any suggestion; they simply stared with all their eyes and souls, absorbed in the unbought excitement of the spectacle. They were helpless, idealess, interested and unconcerned.
“Run and fetch a peeler, Bill,” said Tommy at last.
“Peeler be hanged! Bloomin’ likely I am to find a peeler. Fetch him yourself.”
“Sulky devil you are,” answered Tommy, who was certainly of milder mood; whereas Bill seemed a most unalluring example of the virtue of Temperance. It is true that he had only been “Blue Ribbon” since the end of his Christmas bout – that is, for nearly a fortnight – and Virtue, a precarious tenant, was not yet comfortable in her new lodgings.
Before Tommy returned from his quest the dusk had deepened into night The crowd round the body in the pea-coat had grown denser, and it might truly be said that “the more part knew not wherefore they had come together.” The centre of interest was not a fight, they were sure, otherwise the ring would have been swaying this way and that. Neither was it a dispute between a cabman and his fare: there was no sound of angry repartees. It might be a drunken woman, or a man in a fit, or a lost child. So the outer circle of spectators, who saw nothing, waited, and patiently endured till the moment of revelation should arrive. Respectable people who passed only glanced at the gathering; respectable people may wonder, but they never do find out the mystery within a London crowd. On the extreme fringe of the mob were some amateurs who had just been drinking in the Hit or Miss. They were noisy, curious, and impatient.
At last Tommy arrived with two policeman, who, acting on his warning, had brought with them a stretcher. He had told them briefly how the dead man was found in the cart-load of snow.
Before the men in blue, the crowd of necessity opened. One of the officers stooped down and flashed his lantern on the heap of snow where the dead face lay, as pale as its frozen pillow.
“Lord, it’s old Dicky Shields!” cried a voice in the crowd, as the peaked still features were lighted up.
The man who spoke was one of the latest spectators that had arrived, after the news that some pleasant entertainment was on foot had passed into the warm alcoholic air and within the swinging doors of the Hit or Miss.
“You know him, do you?” asked the policeman with the lantern.
“Know him, rather! Didn’t I give him sixpence for rum when he tattooed this here cross and anchor on my arm? Dicky was a grand hand at tattooing, bless you: he’d tattooed himself all over!”
The speaker rolled up his sleeve, and showed, on his burly red forearm, the emblems of Faith and Hope rather neatly executed in blue.
“Why, he was in the Hit or Miss,” the speaker went on, “no later nor last night.”
“Wot beats me,” said Tommy again, as the policeman lifted the light corpse, and tried vainly to straighten the frozen limbs, “Wot beats me is how he got in this here cart of ours.”
“He’s light enough surely,” added Tommy; “but I warrant we didn’t chuck him on the cart with the snow in Belgrave Square.”
“Where do you put up at night?” asked one of the policemen suddenly. He had been ruminating on the mystery.
“In the yard there, behind that there hoarding,” answered Tommy, pointing to a breached and battered palisade near the corner of the public-house.
At the back of this ricketty plank fence, with its particolored tatters of damp and torn advertisements, lay a considerable space of waste ground. The old houses that recently occupied the site had been pulled down, probably as condemned “slums,” in some moment of reform, when people had nothing better to think of than the housing of the poor.
There had been an idea of building model lodgings for tramps, with all the latest improvements,
A quid in the
