"Don't like the looks of you, mister!" said Uncle Mo to himself. But aloud he said:--"Good-morning to _you_, sir. I understood you to be inquiring for Mrs. Prichard."
"No--Daverill. No such a name, this young shaver says."
"Not down this Court. It wasn't Burr by any chance now, was it?"
"Because there _is_ a party by the name of Burr if you could have seen your way." This was only the natural civility which sometimes runs riot with an informant's judgment, making him anxious to meet the inquirer at any cost, whatever inalienable stipulations the latter may have committed himself to. In this case it seemed that nothing short of Daverill, crisp and well defined, would satisfy the conditions. The stranger shook his head with as much decision as reciprocal civility permitted--rather as though he regretted his inability to accept Burr--and replied that the name had "got to be" Daverill and no other. But he seemed reluctant to leave the widows down this Court unsifted, saying:--"You're sure there ain't any other old party now?" To which Uncle Moses responded: "Ne'er a one, master, to _my_ knowledge. Widow Daverill she's somewheres else. Not down _this_ Court!" He said it in a valedictory way as though he had no wish to open a new subject, and considered this one closed. He had profited by his inspection of the stranger, and had formed a low opinion of him.
But the stranger's reluctance continued. "You couldn't say, I suppose," said he, in a cautious hesitating way, "you couldn't say what countrywoman she was, now?" His manner might easily have been--so Uncle Mo thought at least--that of indigence trying to get a foothold with an eye to begging in the end. It really was the furtive suspiciousness that hangs alike upon the miscreant and the mere rebel against law into whose bones the fetter has rusted. The guilt of the former, if he can cheat both the gaol and the gallows, may merge in the demeanour of a free man; that of the latter, after a decade of prison-service you or I might have remitted, will hang by him till death.
Uncle Mo may have detected, through the mere blood-poisoning of the prison, the inherent baseness of the man, or may have recoiled from the type. Anyway, his instinct was to get rid of him. And evidently the less he said about anyone in Sapps Court the better. So he replied, surlily enough considering his really amiable disposition:--"No--I could _not_ say what countrywoman she is, master." Then he thought a small trifle of fiction thrown in might contribute to the detachment of this man's curiosity from Mrs. Prichard, and added carelessly:--"Some sort of a foringer I take it." Which accounted, too, for his knowing nothing about her. No true Englishman knows anything about that benighted class.