"I'm going to get some money."
Mrs. Brigg ran out.
"Money!" she said in a keen treble. "Where are you going to git it?"
"Never you mind," said Cuckoo, in a dull voice.
She turned from Mrs. Brigg's flooding ejaculations and was gone. In her
peregrinations about London she had sometimes encountered in a certain
thoroughfare a broad old man with a face marked with small-pox, who
wore a fur cap and leggings. This individual conveyed upon his thickest
person certain clinging rats, which crawled about him in the public view
while he walked, and he led in strings three or four terriers, sometimes
a pup or two. Cuckoo had seen him more than once in conversation with
some young swell, even with gaily-dressed women, had noticed that his
terriers here to-day were often gone to-morrow, replaced by other dogs,
pugs perhaps, or a waddling, bow-legged dachshund. She drew her own
conclusions. And she had seen that the old man's eyes, in his poacher
face, were kindly, that his trotting dogs often aimed their sharp, or
blunt, noses at his hands and seemed to claim his notice. Her morning
errand was to him.
She walked a long time in search of him, trembling with the fear of
finding him, inconsistently. Her mind, reacting on her ill-fed body,
planted a crawling weariness there, and at last she had to stop and
examine her pockets.
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