off, myself, in considering the question whether I ought to restore a couple of pounds sterling to this creature before losing sight of him, and how it could best be done. In the act of dipping forward as if I were going to bathe among the horses, I woke in a fright and took the question up again.
But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although I could recognize nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind that blew at us. Cowering forward for warmth and to make me a screen against the wind, the convicts were closer to me than before. The very first words I heard them interchange as I became conscious, were the words of my own thought, “Two One Pound notes.”
“How did he get ’em?” said the convict I had never seen.
“How should I know?” returned the other. “He had ’em stowed away somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect.”
“I wish,” said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, “that I had ’em here.”
“Two one pound notes, or friends?”
“Two one pound notes. I’d sell all the friends I ever had for one, and think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says—?”
“So he says,” resumed the convict I had recognized—“it was all said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the dockyard—‘You’re a going to be discharged?’ Yes, I was. Would I find out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him them two one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did.”
“More fool you,” growled the other. “I’d have spent ’em on a Man, in wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he knowed nothing of you?”