‘Hello!’ he said, as we appeared. He jerked a thumb towards the classroom. ‘I’ve locked dem in. What’s doin’, Buck?’ he asked, indicating me with a languid nod.
‘We’re going t’roo de joint,’ explained Mr MacGinnis. ‘De kid ain’t in dere. Hump yourself, Sam!’
His colleague’s languor disappeared with magic swiftness.
‘Sam! Is dat Sam? Here, let me beat de block off’n him!’
Few points in this episode struck me as more remarkable than the similarity of taste which prevailed, as concerned myself, among the members of Mr MacGinnis’s gang. Men, doubtless of varying opinions on other subjects, on this one point they were unanimous. They all wanted to assault me.
Buck, however, had other uses for me. For the present, I was necessary as a guide, and my value as such would be impaired were the block to be beaten off me. Though feeling no friendlier towards me than did his assistants, he declined to allow sentiment to interfere with business. He concentrated his attention on the upward journey with all the earnestness of the young gentleman who carried the banner with the strange device in the poem.
Briefly requesting his ally to cheese it–which he did–he urged me on with the nozzle of the pistol. The red-moustached man sank back against the wall again with an air of dejection, sucking his cigar now like one who has had disappointments in life, while we passed on up the stairs and began to draw the rooms on the first floor.
These consisted of Mr Abney’s study and two dormitories. The study was empty, and the only occupants of the dormitories were the three boys who had been stricken down with colds on the occasion of Mr MacGinnis’s last visit. They squeaked with surprise at the sight of the assistant-master in such questionable company.
Buck eyed them disappointedly. I waited with something of the feelings of a drummer taking a buyer round the sample room.
‘Get on,’ said Buck.
‘Won’t one of those do?’
‘Hump yourself, Sam.’
‘Call me Sammy,’ I urged. ‘We’re old friends now.’
‘Don’t get fresh,’ he said austerely. And we moved on.
The top floor was even more deserted than the first. There was no one in the dormitories. The only other room was Mr Abney’s; and, as we came opposite it, a sneeze from within told of the sufferings of its occupant.
The sound stirred Buck to his depths. He ‘pointed’ at the door like a smell-dog.
‘Who’s in dere?’ he demanded.
‘Only Mr Abney. Better not disturb him. He has a bad cold.’
He placed a wrong construction on my solicitude for my employer. His manner became excited.
‘Open dat door, you,’ he cried.
‘It’ll give him a nasty shock.’
‘G’wan! Open it!’
No one who is digging a Browning pistol into the small of my back will ever find me disobliging. I opened the door–knocking first, as a mild concession to the conventions–and the procession passed in.
My stricken employer was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, and our entrance did not at first cause him to change this position.
‘Yes?’ he said thickly, and disappeared beneath a huge pocket-handkerchief. Muffled sounds, as of distant explosions of dynamite, together with earthquake shudderings of the bedclothes, told of another sneezing-fit.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ I began, when Buck, ever the man of action, with a scorn of palaver, strode past me, and, having prodded with the pistol that part of the bedclothes beneath which a rough calculation suggested that Mr Abney’s lower ribs were concealed, uttered the one word, ‘Sa-a-ay!’
Mr Abney sat up like a Jack-in-the-box. One might almost say that he shot up. And then he saw Buck.
I cannot even faintly imagine what were Mr Abney’s emotions at that moment. He was a man who, from boyhood up, had led a quiet and regular life. Things like Buck had appeared to him hitherto, if they appeared at all, only in dreams after injudicious suppers. Even in the ordinary costume of the Bowery gentleman, without such adventitious extras as masks and pistols, Buck was no beauty. With that hideous strip of dingy white linen on his face, he was a walking nightmare.