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"Aw, quit yer kiddin'!" he said gruffly. "A century note fer me!" "Dat's wot I said! Youse heard me!" rejoined the Magpie shortly. "Only if it listens good to youse now, I don't want no squealin' after the divvy. I'm takin' de chances, youse has de soft end of it. One century note fer youse an' de rest is none of yer business! Dat's puttin' it straight, ain't it?
Then he came back to his seat and fixed his eyes on the perturbed face of the young man. 'Does your father know that you are back? he asked. 'No one knows that I am here save Mrs Pansey. 'Then it won't be a secret long, said Graham, drily; 'that old magpie is as good as the town-crier. You left your mother well? 'Quite well; and Lucy also. I made an excuse to come back.
They dripped on the carpet, they were conventional and courteous; we made conversation between us; but whenever the thunder rolled, Mrs. James became ghastly pale. Mr. James explained that this was his birthday, and that they were on a pleasure excursion. He conciliated me by anecdotes of a pet magpie or raven who stole spoons.
It was not the Magpie's way, the front door the obvious to the Magpie and his ilk was a thing always to be shunned. Jimmie Dale's lips were set in a grim smile, as his fingers worked with lightning speed, now taking this instrument and now that from the leather pockets in the girdle beneath his shirt the penitentiaries were full of Magpies who shunned the obvious!
But before he had begun, they turned in to the Vicus Patricius, and soon found themselves before the dwelling of Aulus. A young and sturdy "janitor" opened the door leading to the ostium, over which a magpie confined in a cage greeted them noisily with the word, "Salve!"
The bird also began to play in semi-human style, performing marvellous acrobatic feats on the clothes-line, and lying on its back juggling with a twig as some "artists" do with a barrel in the circus. A white-eared flycatcher took up its abode near the house, and the magpie, after a decent lapse of time, admitted the stranger to its companionship.
For the magpie is the cleverest bird of all at building nests. So she put all the birds round her and began to show them how to do it. First of all she took some mud and made a sort of round cake with it. "Oh, that's how it's done!" said the thrush, and away it flew; and so that's how thrushes build their nests. Then the magpie took some twigs and arranged them round in the mud.
But the truth wasn't necessary; it was foreign, and had no bearing on the one outstanding fact the Gray Seal was Larry the Bat. At the present moment the Magpie had a double incentive for "getting" the Gray Seal the Gray Seal was the only one who could prove murder against him that night in the LaSalle mansion.
The Magpie had, at the outside, a start of fifteen minutes; but he, Jimmie Dale, had probably retrieved five minutes of that in the time he had made in getting downtown. That left the Magpie ten to the good. How long would it take the Magpie to bring the underworld swarming like hornets around the Sanctuary? On Larry the Bat ran. At the Sanctuary were the clothes, the belongings of Jimmie Dale.
"You get wages every month, and I'll be bound you sell timber on the sly." Artyom took a timid sideway glance at his visitor and twitched his beard as a magpie twitches her tail. "You are still young to say a thing like that to me," he said. "You will have to answer to God for those words. Whom may your people be? Where do you come from?" "I am from Vyazovka.
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