The trail of the serpent

“Then go,” Mr. Peters wrote, in large letters and no capitals. “Oh, ah; yes, to be sure,” replied the Smasher, who, I regret to say, felt painfully, in his absence from domestic pleasures, the want of somebody to quarrel with; “No, I thank you! Go the very day as you’re going to catch him! Not if I’m in any manner aware of the circumstance. I’m obliged to you,” he added, with satirical emphasis. “Come, I say, old boy,” interposed Gus, who had been quietly doing execution upon a plate of devilled kidneys during this little friendly altercation, “come, I say, no snarling, Smasher, Peters isn’t going to contest the belt with you, you know.” “You needn’t be a-diggin’ at me because I ain’t champion,” said the ornament of the P.R., who was inclined to find a malicious meaning in every word uttered that morning; “you needn’t come any of your sneers because I ain’t got the belt any longer.” The Smasher had been Champion of England in his youth, but had retired upon his laurels for many years, and only occasionally emerged from private life in a public-house to take a round or two with some old opponent. “I tell you what it is, Smasher--it’s my opinion the air of Liverpool don’t suit your constitution,” said Gus. “We’ve promised to stand by Peters here, and to go by his word in everything, for the sake of the man we want to serve; and, however trying it may be to our patience doing nothing, which perhaps is about as much as we can do and make no mistakes, the first that gets tired and deserts the ship will be no friend to Richard Marwood.” “I’m a bad lot, Mr. Darley, and that’s the truth,” said the mollified Smasher; “but the fact is, I’m used to a turn with the gloves every morning before breakfast with the barman, and when I don’t get it, I dare say I ain’t the pleasantest company goin’. I should think they’ve got gloves in the house: would you mind taking off your coat and having a turn--friendly like?” Gus assured the Smasher that nothing would please him better than that trifling diversion; and in five minutes they had pushed Mr. Peters and the breakfast-table into a corner, and were hard at it, Mr. Darley’s knowledge of the art being all required to keep the slightest pace with the scientific movements of the agile though elderly Smasher. Mr. Peters did not stay at the breakfast-table long, but after having drunk a huge breakfast cupful of very opaque and substantial-looking coffee at a draught, just as if it had been half a pint of beer, he slid quietly out of the room. “It’s my opinion,” said the Smasher, as he stood, or rather lounged, upon his guard, and warded off the most elaborate combinations of Mr. Darley’s fists with as much ease as he would have brushed aside so many flies--“it’s my opinion that chap ain’t up to his business.” “Isn’t he?” replied Gus, as he threw down the gloves in despair, after having been half an hour in a violent perspiration, without having succeeded in so much as rumpling the Smasher’s hair. “Isn’t he?” he said, choosing the interrogative as the most expressive form of speech. “That man’s got head enough to be prime minister, and carry the House along with every twist of his fingers.” “He must make his p’s and b’s a little plainer afore he’ll get a bill through the Commons though,” muttered the Left-handed one, who couldn’t quite get over his feelings of injury against the detective for the utter darkness in which he had been kept for the last three days as to the other’s plans. The Smasher and Mr. Darley passed the morning in that remarkably intellectual and praiseworthy manner peculiar to gentlemen who, being thrown out of their usual occupation, are cast upon their own resources for amusement and employment. There was the daily paper to be looked at, to begin with; but after Gus had glanced at the leading article, a _rifacimento_ of the _Times_ leader of the day before, garnished with some local allusions, and highly spiced with satirical remarks _apropos_ to our spirited contemporary the _Liverpool Aristides_; after the Smasher had looked at the racing fixtures for the coming week, and made rude observations on the editing of a journal which failed to describe the coming off of the event between Silver-polled Robert and the Chester Crusher--after, I say, the two gentlemen had each devoured his favourite page, the paper was an utter failure in the matter of excitement, and the window was the next best thing. Now to the peculiarly constituted mind of the Left-handed one, looking out of a window was in itself very slow work; and unless he was allowed to eject missiles of a trifling but annoying character--such as hot ashes out of his pipe, the last drop of his pint of beer, the dirty water out of the saucers belonging to the flower-pots on the window-sill, or lighted lucifer-matches--into the eyes of the unoffending passers-by, he didn’t, to use his own forcible remark, “seem to see the fun of it.” Harmless old gentlemen with umbrellas, mild elderly ladies with hand-baskets and brass-handled green-silk parasols, and young ladies of from ten to twelve going to school in clean frocks, and on particularly good terms with themselves, the Smasher looked upon as his peculiar prey. To put his head out of the window and make tender and polite inquiries about their maternal parents; to go further still, and express an earnest wish to be informed of those parents’ domestic arrangements, and whether they had been induced to part with a piece of machinery of some importance in the getting up of linen; to insinuate alarming suggestions of mad bulls in the next street, or a tiger just broke loose from the Zoological Gardens; to terrify the youthful scholar by asking him derisively whether he wouldn’t “catch it when he got to school? Oh, no, not at all, neither!” and to draw his head away suddenly, and altogether disappear from public view; to act, in fact, after the manner of an accomplished clown in a Christmas pantomime, was the weak delight of his manly mind: and when prevented by Mr. Darley’s friendly remonstrance from doing this, the Smasher abandoned the window altogether, and concentrated all the powers of his intellect on the pursuit of a lively young bluebottle, which eluded his bandanna at every turn, and bumped itself violently against the window-panes at the very moment its pursuer was looking for it up the chimney. Time and the hour made very long work of this particular morning, and several glasses of bitter had been called for, and numerous games of cribbage had been played by the two companions, when Mr. Darley, looking at his watch for not more than the twenty-second time in the last hour, announced with some satisfaction that it was half-past two o’clock, and that it was consequently very near dinner-time. “Peters is a long time gone,” suggested the Smasher. “Take my word for it,” said Gus, “something has turned up; he has laid his hand upon De Marolles at last.” “I don’t think it,” replied his ally, obstinately refusing to believe in Mr. Peters’s extra share of the divine afflatus; “and if he did come across him, how’s he to detain him, I’d like to know? _He_ couldn’t go in with _his_ left,” he muttered derisively, “and split his head open upon the pavement to keep him quiet for a day or two.” At this very moment there came a tap at the door, and a youthful person in corduroy and a perspiration entered the room, with a very small and very dirty piece of paper twisted up into a bad imitation of a three-cornered note. “Please, you was to give me sixpence if I run all the way,” remarked the youthful Mercury, “an’ I ’ave: look at my forehead;” and, in proof of his fidelity, the messenger pointed to the water-drops which chased each other down his open brow and ran a dead heat to the end of his nose. The scrawl ran thus--“The _Washington_ sails at three for New York: be on the quay and see the passengers embark: don’t notice me unless I notice you. Yours truly ---- ----” “It was just give me by a gent in a hurry wot was dumb, and wrote upon a piece of paper to tell me to run my legs off so as you should have it quick--thank you kindly, sir, and good afternoon,” said the messenger, all in one breath, as he bowed his gratitude for the shilling Gus tossed him as he dismissed him. “I said so,” cried the young surgeon, as the Smasher applied himself to the note with quite as much, nay, perhaps more earnestness and solemnity than Chevalier Bunsen might have assumed when he deciphered a half-erased and illegible inscription, in a language which for some two thousand years has been unknown to mortal man. “I said so; Peters is on the scent, and this man will be taken yet. Put on your hat, Smasher, and let’s lose no time; it only wants a quarter to three, and I wouldn’t be out of this for a great deal.” “I shouldn’t much relish being out of the fun either,” replied his companion; “and if it comes to blows, perhaps it’s just as well I haven’t had my dinner.” There were a good many people going by the _Washington_, and the deck of the small steamer which was to convey them on board the great ship, where she lay in graceful majesty down the noble Mersey river, was crowded with every species of luggage it was possible to imagine as appertaining to the widest varieties of the genus traveller. There was the maiden lady, with a small income from the three-per-cents, and a determination of blood to the tip of a sharp nose, going out to join a married brother in New York, and evidently intent upon importing a gigantic brass cage, containing a parrot in the last stage of bald-headedness--politely called moulting; and a limp and wandering-minded umbrella--weak in the ribs, and further afflicted with a painfully sharp ferrule, which always appeared where it was not expected, and evidently hankered wildly after the bystanders’ backbones--as favourable specimens of the progress of the fine arts in the mother country. There were several of those brilliant birds-of-passage popularly known as “travellers,” whose heavy luggage consisted of a carpet-bag and walking-stick, and whose light ditto was composed of a pocket-book and a silver pencil-case of protean construction, which was sometimes a pen, now and then a penknife, and very often a toothpick. These gentlemen came down to the steamer at the last moment, inspiring the minds of nervous passengers with supernatural and convulsive cheerfulness by the light and airy way in which they bade adieu to the comrades who had just looked round to see them start, and who made appointments with them for Christmas supper-parties, and booked bets with them for next year’s Newmarket first spring--as if such things as shipwreck, peril by sea, heeling over _Royal Georges_, lost _Presidents_, with brilliant Irish comedians setting forth on their return to the land in which they had been so beloved and admired, never, never to reach the shore, were things that could not be. There were rosy-cheeked country lasses, going over to earn fabulous wages and marry impossibly rich husbands. There were the old people, who essayed this long journey on an element which they knew only by sight, in answer to the kind son’s noble letter, inviting them to come and share the pleasant home his sturdy arm had won far away in the fertile West. There were stout Irish labourers armed with pickaxe and spade, as with the best sword wherewith to open the great oyster of the world in these latter degenerate days. There was the distinguished American family, with ever so many handsomely dressed, spoiled, affectionate children clustering round papa and mamma, and having their own way, after the manner of transatlantic youth. There were, in short, all the people who usually assemble when