Page:Marriott Watson--Galloping Dick.djvu/164

 and there’s stuff in him to stop a regiment. And here’s the moral of it. Why, an’ so be we have been damned fools enough to rattle the dice for Timothy Grubbe, why we’re fools, and there’s no more to say. But what’s gone is gone, and to curl up with the mullygrubs because the milk is a trifle sour, is neither to your credit nor to mine. And that’s plain,” I says.

He grumbled a little further, but seeing that he was coming round, I said no more; but that young bantam Zacchary, who was well primed with drink, must needs put out his jerks.

“Let me rot for a corpse,” he says, clinking his glass, a but I’d think shame to turn pale afore a small job like this, more especially after twenty years’ service. ’Tis not my notion of business,” says he, looking very scornfully at Creech.

But I saw that Dan was scowling, and the lad was getting over-ripe with liquor, so I broke in roughly. “Hold up there, you young slipstring,” I said, “and let less go in and less come out at your mouth.”