I'll let you have the concert-room--and hang the consequences. But
what about the boy on late duty? If he sees the cards and actual money
passing, he will be sure to blab, and it will be all over the town in no
time."
A ghastly smile stirred the lips of Mr. Jones.
"Ah, I see you want to make a success of it. Very good. That's the way
to get on. Don't let it disturb you. You chase all the Chinamen to bed
early, and we'll get Pedro here every evening. He isn't the conventional
waiter's cut, but he will do to run to and fro with the tray, while
you sit here from nine to eleven serving out drinks and gathering the
money."
"There will be three of them now," thought the unlucky Schomberg.
But Pedro, at any rate, was just a simple, straightforward brute, if
a murderous one. There was no mystery about him, nothing uncanny, no
suggestion of a stealthy, deliberate wildcat turned into a man, or of an
insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and bones and
a subtle power of terror. Pedro with his fangs, his tangled beard, and
queer stare of his little bear's eyes was, by comparison, delightfully
natural. Besides, Schomberg could no longer help himself.
"That will do very well," he asserted mournfully. "But if you gentlemen,
if you had turned up here only three months ago--ay, less than three
months ago--you would have found somebody very different from what I am
now to talk to you.
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