“A can keep things in my yead,” said George, “better than most folks can keep a book; I knows what I has, and what other folks can’t get at. I knows how I put un in. First, the five-pound bill”—
“They must have stared to see you bring five pound in a lump, George, my dear!” said the hunchback. “Was it wise, do you think?”
“Gearge bean’t such a vool as a looks,” replied the miller’s man. “A took good care to change it first, Cheap John, and a put it in by bits.”
“You’re a clever customer, George,” said his friend. “Well, my dear? First, the five-pound bill, and then?”
George looked puzzled, and then, suddenly, angry. “What be that to you?” he asked, and forthwith relapsed into a sulky fit, from which the Cheap Jack found it impossible to rouse him. All attempts to renew the subject, or to induce the miller’s man to talk at all, proved fruitless. The Cheap Jack insisted, however, on taking a friendly leave.
“Good-by, my dear,” said he, “till the mop. You knows my place in the town, and I shall expect you.”
The miller’s man only replied by a defiant nod, which possibly meant that he would come, but had some appearance of expressing only a sarcastic wish that the Cheap Jack might see him on the occasion alluded to.
In obedience to a yell from its master, the white horse now started forward, and it is not too much to say that the journey to town was not made more pleasant for the poor beast by the fact that the Cheap Jack had a good deal of long-suppressed fury to vent upon somebody.
It was perhaps well for the bones of the white horse that, just as they entered the town, the Cheap Jack brushed against a woman on the narrow foot-path, who having turned to remonstrate in no very civil terms, suddenly checked herself, and said in a low voice, “Juggling Jack!”
The dwarf started, and looked at the woman with a puzzled air.
She was a middle-aged woman, in the earlier half of middle age; she was shabbily dressed, and had a face that would not have been ill-looking, but that the upper lip was long and cleft, and the lower one unusually large. As the Cheap Jack still stared in silence, she burst into a noisy laugh, saying, “More know Jack the Fool than Jack the Fool knows.” But, even as she spoke, a gleam of recognition suddenly spread over the hunchback’s face, and, putting out his hand, he said, “Sal! _you here_, my dear?”