CHAPTER VI
THE DICERS
Philip knocked. The corner of the oiled paper which half concealed the light within the shack was lifted, a blood-shot eye applied to the chink, and he was admitted into the uncertain glow of a low-hanging lantern, flickering on three very diverse and ugly figures sprawled out on the bunk and the floor.
"Why if it ain't m' lud Chestyfield come to pay us a call! Here, Swedie, take his card," said the husky at the door, proffering a flask. "Yer good health, m' lud."
The ceremonial was accompanied by a bow whose irony Master Philip chose to ignore as a princeling might the jeers of a Whitechapel mob. With something of the gesture with which the royal victim would have flicked an imaginary bit of dust from a lace cuff, the youth adjusted his tie, with a request to "cut the comedy, Pete," and looked scornfully at the speaker,—a beamy, ox-shouldered hulk of a man, with a sailor's legs, a mechanic's smeared hands, and a pugilist neck and jowl. Over these a seaming scar, the result of an old boiler explosion, ran to the puffed ear. The same catastrophe had marked him with a still more peculiar branding—a circular indentation stamped squarely in the center of his
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