Detective and mystery stories, English; Private investigators -- Fiction
There were two foolscap sheets, written all in Jerry Cater's own
straggling handwriting. Greer hastily scanned the sheets, and his
dirty face grew longer and his squint intensified as he turned over
the second sheet, found nothing behind it, and stuffed the papers
back in his pocket. For it was plain that not a penny of old Jerry
Cater's money was for his faithful servant, Samuel Greer. "Ungrateful
ole waga-bone!" mused the faithful servant as he went his way. "Not
a blessed 'a'peny; not a 'a'peny! An' them as don't want it gets it,
o' course. That's always the way--it's like a-greasing' of a fat
pig. I shall 'ave to get what I can while I can, that's all." And so
ruminating he pursued his way to the butcher's in Grange Road.
Once more on his way there, and twice on his way back, Samuel Greer
stepped into retired places to look at those papers again, and at each
inspection he grew more thoughtful. There might be money in it yet.
Come, he must think it over.
The front door being shut, and Sinclair probably not yet returned, he
entered the house by a way familiar to the inmates--a latched door
giving on to the wharf. The clock told him that he had been gone nearly
an hour, but Sinclair was still absent. When he entered old Cater's
room upstairs he found a great change. The old man lay in a state of
collapse, choking with a cough that exhausted him; and for this there
seemed little wonder, for the window was open, and the room was full of
the cold air from the river.
"Wot jer bin openin' the winder for?" asked Greer in astonishment.
"It's enough to give ye yer death." He shut it and returned to the
bedside. But though he offered his master the change from the shilling
the old man seemed not to see it nor to hear his voice.
"Well, if you won't--don't," observed Greer with some alacrity,
pocketing the coppers. "But I'll bet he'll remember right enough
presently." "D'y'ear," he added, bending over the bed, "I've got the
beef. Shall I bile it now?"
But old Jerry Cater's eyes still saw nothing and he heard not, though
his shrunken chest and shoulders heaved with the last shudders of the
cough that had exhausted him. So Greer stepped lightly to the cupboard
and restored the fire policy and the receipts to the pickle-jar. He
kept the will.
Greer made preparations for cooking the beef, and as he did so he
encountered another phenomenon. "Well, he have bin a goin' of it!" said
Greer. "Blow me if he ain't bin readin' the Bible now!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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