Page:The history of Mr. Polly.djvu/275

 ) cinder track. I want a word with you, mister. See?”

Mr. Polly wriggled his arm free and stopped. “What is it?” he asked, and faced the terror.

“I jest want a (decorated) word wiv you. See?—just a friendly word or two. Just to clear up any blooming errors. That’s all I want. No need to be so (richly decorated) proud, if you are the noo bloke at Potwell Inn. Not a bit of it. See?”

Uncle Jim was certainly not a handsome person. He was short, shorter than Mr. Polly, with long arms and lean big hands, a thin and wiry neck stuck out of his grey flannel shirt and supported a big head that had something of the snake in the convergent lines of its broad knotty brow, meanly proportioned face and pointed chin. His almost toothless mouth seemed a cavern in the twilight. Some accident had left him with one small and active and one large and expressionless reddish eye, and wisps of straight hair strayed from under the blue cricket cap he wore pulled down obliquely over the latter. He spat between his teeth and wiped his mouth untidily with the soft side of his fist.

“You got to blurry well shift,” he said. “See?”

“Shift!” said Mr. Polly. “How?”

“’Cos the Potwell Inn’s my beat. See?”

Mr. Polly had never felt less witty. “How’s it your beat?” he asked.

Uncle Jim thrust his face forward and shook his open hand, bent like a claw, under Mr. Polly’s nose. “Not