The Mark Of Cain Part 3

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 d.i.c.kens 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 s.h.i.+vered beside the body for a moment.

"He's a goner," was her criticism. "I wish _I_ was."

With this aspiration she s.h.i.+vered 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 pa.s.sed 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 d.i.c.ky s.h.i.+elds!" 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 pa.s.sed 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? d.i.c.ky 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 h.o.a.rding," 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts, lay a considerable s.p.a.ce 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, on the s.p.a.ce, but the idea evaporated when something else occurred to divert the general interest. Now certain sheds, with roofs sloped against the nearest walls, formed a kind of lumber-room for the parish.

At this time the scavengers' carts were housed in the sheds, or outside the sheds when these were overcrowded. Not far off were stables for the horses, and thus the waste ground was not left wholly unoccupied.

"Was this cart o' yours under the sheds all night or in the open?" asked the policeman, with an air of penetration.

"Just outside the shed, worn't it, Bill?" replied Tommy.

Bill said nothing, being a person disinclined to commit himself.

"If the cart was outside," said the policeman, "then the thing's plain enough. You started from there, didn't you, with the cart in the afternoon?"

"Ay," answered Tommy.

"And there was a little sprinkle o' snow in the cart?"

"May be there wos. I don't remember one way or the other."

"Then you _must_ be a stupid if you don't see that this here cove,"

pointing to the dead man, "got drinking too much last night, lost hisself, and wandered inside the h.o.a.rding, where he fell asleep in the cart."

"Snow do make a fellow bloomin' sleepy," one of the crowd a.s.sented.

"Well, he never wakened no more, and the snow had covered over his body when you started with the cart, and him in it, unbeknown. He's light enough to make no difference to the weight. Was it dark when you started?"

"One of them spells of fog was on; you could hardly see your hand,"

grunted Tommy.

"Well, then, it's as plain as--as the nose on your face," said the policeman, without any sarcastic intentions. "That's how it was."

"Bravo, Bobby!" cried one of the crowd. "They should make you an inspector, and set you to run in them dynamiting Irish coves."

The policeman was not displeased at this popular tribute to his shrewdness. Dignity forbade him, however, to acknowledge the compliment, and he contented himself with lifting the two handles of the stretcher which was next him. A covering was thrown over the face of the dead man, and the two policemen, with their burden, began to make their way northward to the hospital.

A small mob followed them, but soon dwindled into a tail of street boys and girls. These accompanied the body till it disappeared from their eyes within the hospital doors. Then they waited for half an hour or so, and at last seemed to evaporate into the fog.

By this time Tommy and his mate had unharnessed their horses and taken them to stable, the cart was housed (beneath the sheds this time), and Bill had so far succ.u.mbed to the genial influences of the occasion as to tear off his blue badge and follow Tommy into the _Hit or Miss_.

A few chance acquaintances, hospitable and curious, accompanied them, intent on providing with refreshments and plying with questions the heroes of so remarkable an adventure. It is true that they already knew all Tommy and Bill had to tell; but there is a pleasure, in moments of emotional agitation, in repeating at intervals the same questions, and making over and again the same profound remarks. The charm of these performances was sure to be particularly keen within the very walls where the dead man had probably taken his last convivial gla.s.s, and where some light was certain to be thrown, by the landlady or her customers, on the habits and history of poor d.i.c.ky s.h.i.+elds.

CHAPTER III.--An Academic Pothouse.

The _Hit or Miss_ tavern, to customers (rough customers, at least) who entered it on a foggy winter night, seemed merely a public by the river's brim. Not being ravaged and parched by a thirst for the picturesque, Tommy and his mates failed to pause and observe the architectural peculiarities of the building. Even if they had been of a romantic and antiquarian turn, the fog was so thick that they could have seen little to admire, though there was plenty to be admired. The _Hit or Miss_ was not more antique in its aspect than modern in its fortunes.

Few public-houses, if any, boasted for their landlord such a person as Robert Maitland, M.A., Fellow of St. Gatien's, in the University of Oxford.

It is, perhaps, desirable and even necessary to explain how this arrangement came into existence. We have already made acquaintance with "mine host" of the _Hit or Miss_, and found him to be by no means the rosy, genial Boniface of popular tradition. That a man like Maitland should be the lessee of a waterside tavern, like the _Hit or Miss_, was only one of the anomalies of this odd age of ours. An age of revivals, restorations, experiments--an age of dukes who are Socialists--an age which sees the East-end brawling in Pall Mall, and parties of West-end tourists personally conducted down Ratcliffe Highway--need not wonder at Maitland's eccentric choice in philanthropy.