Irons turned pale, and looked down embarrassed as it seemed, and began
plucking at a tangled piece of tackle, without making any answer.

'Hey? Irons,' persisted Dangerfield, who was not going to let him off.

'Yes, I do,' answered the man surlily; 'I remember him right well; but
I'd rather not, _and_ I won't speak of him, that's all.'

'Well, Charles Archer's _here_, we've seen him, haven't we? and just the
devil he always was,' said Dangerfield with a deliberate chuckle of
infinite relish, and evidently enjoying the clerk's embarrassment as he
eyed him through his spectacles obliquely.

'He has seen _you_, too, he says; and thinks _you_ have seen _him_,
hey?' and Dangerfield chuckled more and more knowingly, and watched his
shiftings and sulkings with a pleasant grin, as he teased and quizzed
him in his own enigmatical way.

'Well, supposing I _did_ see him,' said Irons, looking up, returning
Dangerfield's comic glance with a bold and lowering stare; 'and
supposing _he_ saw _me_, so long as we've no business one of another,
and never talks like, nor seems to remember--I think 'tisnt, no ways, no
one's business--that's what I say.'

'True, Irons, very true; you, I, and Sturk--the doctor I mean--are cool
fellows, and don't want for nerve; but I think, don't you? we're afraid
of Charles Archer, for all that.'

'Fear or no fear, I don't want to talk _to_ him nor _of_ him, no ways,'
replied the clerk, grimly, and looking as black as a thunder-cloud.

'Nor I neither, but you know he's here, and what a devil he is; and we
can't help it,' replied Dangerfield, very much tickled.

The clerk only looked through his nearly closed eyes, and with the same
pale and surly aspect toward the point to which Dangerfield's casting
line had floated, and observed--

'You'll lose them flies, Sir.'

'Hey?' said Dangerfield, and made another cast further into the stream.

'Whatever he may seem, and I think I know him pretty well,' he continued
in the same sprightly way, 'Charles Archer would dispose of each of
us--you understand--without a scruple, precisely when and how best
suited his convenience. Now doctor Sturk has sent him a message which I
know will provoke him, for it sounds like a threat. If he reads it so,
rely on't, he'll lay Sturk on his back, one way or another, and I'm
sorry for him, for I wished him well; but if he will play at brag with
the _devil I_ can't help him.'

'I'm a man that holds his tongue; I never t