“You want ’em,” said Riderhood, making towards the schoolmaster by his plank bridge.
“I don’t want them,” returned Bradley, irritably, “because I would rather not have them, but would much prefer to follow him all night. However, if he won’t lead, I can’t follow. I have been waiting about, until I could discover, for a certainty, at what time he starts; if I couldn’t have made sure of it, I should have stayed there.—This would be a bad pit for a man to be flung into with his hands tied. These slippery smooth walls would give him no chance. And I suppose those gates would suck him down?”
“Suck him down, or swaller him up, he wouldn’t get out,” said Riderhood. “Not even, if his hands warn’t tied, he wouldn’t. Shut him in at both ends, and I’d give him a pint o’ old ale ever to come up to me standing here.”
Bradley looked down with a ghastly relish. “You run about the brink, and run across it, in this uncertain light, on a few inches width of rotten wood,” said he. “I wonder you have no thought of being drowned.”
“I can’t be!” said Riderhood.
“You can’t be drowned?”
“No!” said Riderhood, shaking his head with an air of thorough conviction, “it’s well known. I’ve been brought out o’ drowning, and I can’t be drowned. I wouldn’t have that there busted B’lowbridger aware on it, or her people might make it tell agin’ the damages I mean to get. But it’s well known to waterside characters like myself, that him as has been brought out o’ drowning, can never be drowned.”
Bradley smiled sourly at the ignorance he would have corrected in one of his pupils, and continued to look down into the water, as if the place had a gloomy fascination for him.