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"Just cough up the details and let your beastly breakfast wait." The Night Patroller extracted the backbone from a bloater with swift dexterity. "Well," he continued, "it was very dark last night and foggy in patches: rum night. Very little wind and no sea. We were right outside and the Engineer sent up to say he thought there was something foul of the propeller.
He was also to take a little note from me to the head chambermaid an old friend of mine asking her to step over to my office, on a private matter of business, as soon as her work was done for that night. After settling these little matters, having half an hour to spare, I turned to and did myself a bloater at the office fire, and had a drop of gin-and-water hot, and felt comparatively happy.
The Bloater happened to know of a long ladder, whose nightly place of repose was on the ground in a certain dark passage, with its end pointing across that street. Taking up a position beside this ladder, with Little Jim who followed him, almost bursting with delight he bided his time and kept as quiet as a mouse.
If they could have seen the inconceivably idiotic expressions of their countenances when they tried it, they would never have made a second effort! "Wot a jolly lark!" said Little Jim, prefacing the remark with another "sk." "Ha!" replied the Bloater, with a frown that implied the pressure of weighty matters on his mind.
If there ain't hoscillations on that rectangle, strike me in the night-lights!" said Corporal Bagshot, with his eye on the Bengalese. "Blyme, if the whole bloomin' parallogram don't shiver," he added; "for them Osnum Digners 'as the needle, and they're ten to one, or I'm a bloater!"
"You can have anything exthra if you care to pay for it," she remarked. "What have you?" asked Mavis. "Ham, bloater, or chicken pathte, and an exthellent brand of thardines." "I'll try the ham paste," said Mavis. An opened tin of ham paste was put before her. Mavis noticed that the other girls were looking at her out of the corners of their eyes.
In three minutes the engine was out, the horses were attached, the men in their places, and away they went. "Oh! let's follow," cried Little Jim, enthusiastically, while his eyes glittered as if they, too, were on fire. The more sedate Bloater laid his hand heavily on his little friend's shoulder. "No, Jim, no. Business fust, pleasure arterwards. We've got business on hand to-night."
"Oh, I say, Bob, hold on," cried Joe; "you seem to forget that my capacity for swallowing is limited." "Well, perhaps you'll get it enlarged enough before long, to swallow all that and a deal more," said the Bloater, with a half serious air.
After that mother and father said they'd keep the daw a little longer, and then he could let it go at a distance where there were other daws about. By and by they said they'd let it stay where it was. Father liked a bloater for his tea, and there was nothing the jackdaw was fonder of, so he was always on the table at tea-time, eating out of father's plate. Then he got to be troublesome.
During this period Phil Sparks kept in close hiding, because, although the Bloater, true to his promise, refrained from giving information against him, there were others who knew and suspected him, and who had no visions of an imploring Martha to restrain them in their efforts to deliver him into the hands of justice.
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