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Updated: June 11, 2025
Setting out from one or other of the score of garrets and cheap lodgings we had in our time inhabited, we had wandered together, day after day, night after night, far down East, where, as we had threaded our way among the barrels of soused herrings and the stalls and barrows of unleavened bread, he had taught me scraps of Hebrew and Polish and Yiddish; up into the bright West, where he could never walk a quarter of a mile without meeting one of his extraordinary acquaintances furred music-hall managers, hawkers of bootlaces, commercial magnates of his own Faith, touts, crossing-sweepers, painted women; into Soho, where he had names for the very horses on the cab-ranks and the dogs who slumbered under the counters of the sellers of French literature; out to the naphtha-lights and cries of the Saturday night street markets of Islington and the North End Road; into City churches on wintry afternoons, into the studios of famous artists full of handsomely dressed women, into the studios of artists not famous, at the ends of dark and break-neck corridors; to tea at the suburban homes of barmaids and chorus girls, to dinner in the stables of a cavalry-barracks, to supper in cabmen's shelters.
My erratic namesake, with little warning, gave proof of decided dissatisfaction at the racket, and with one reckless bound he unceremoniously separated me from my eight-dollar plug hat, with which I parted company without any assent, express or implied, upon my part. At a break-neck speed we soon arrived in a haven of safety.
A thistle is stuck by some wag under the tail of the steed, who takes fright, runs away, and carries the helmeted rider, bruised and shaken, back into the city. The inevitable conclusion of the story is a severe curtain-lecture from the wife, who is not a little enraged at these break-neck follies of her husband.
"They will be valuable witnesses," he said to himself, "that, whoever else I may be, I am not Dick." So he went on briskly ahead over a covered bridge and down some break-neck wooden steps, and passed through the wicket out upon the railed-in space, where the cabs and omnibuses should have been, but which was now a blank spectral waste with a white ground-fog lurking round its borders.
The light of the lantern feebly glimmered in one direction, and the body-snatchers flitted about like restless ghouls preparing for a horrible banquet. We approached as quietly as possible, and, on emerging from the cover of a copse of hazel bushes, we made a general rush forward. The ghouls were too quick for us, however, and they ran away at a break-neck speed which we did not dare to imitate.
It did but add to my anxiety that the highroad was nowhere visible to me as I ran, so that I could not measure my progress with that of the coach, but was forced to go on at the same break-neck pace, not daring to moderate it in any degree. And I could almost have cried with vexation when that plaguey stitch in the side seized me, and I had to stand a while to recover my breath.
"There'll be no soap made out of old Cuddy," Gething interrupted him, "I'll ride him out up to the top of Break-Neck Hill and shoot him there. You'd better begin the trench by noon. When it's dug I'll take him to the top and " "But nobody's been on his back since your father said it was useless to try to make him over.
I heard a good deal about panics I was now to see one with my own eyes. Whilst I was looking for my horse to get him up-saddled a few of the burghers were making some sort of a stand against the enemy. But all those who had already up-saddled were riding away at break-neck speed. Many even were leaving their saddles behind and galloping off bare-back. As I up-saddled my horse I called out to them:
And he and his rascally followers seemed to know their ground, for they rode at break-neck pace, without fear of what lay beyond and unseen. It is likely they had traveled that route before. Another advantage lay with the rustlers.
Whenever he ran over his line, which he often did for information and amusement, and for the pleasure of exercising his power, he went in a special car, at break-neck speed, by telegraph, always accompanied by a body of friends and toadies, whom he feasted on the way. Everybody wanted to see him. He was as much a lion as if he had been an Emperor or a murderer.
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