Chapter 8

THE BOY WITH TWO MOTHERS

"I love my dear father and my dear mother and all the dear little kids
at 'ome. You are a kind laidy or gentleman. I love yer. I will never do
it again, so help me bob. Amen."

This was what Shovel muttered to himself again and again as the two boys
made their way across the lamp-lit Hungerford Bridge, and Tommy asked
him what it meant.

"My old gal learned me that; she's deep," Shovel said, wiping the words
off his mouth with his sleeve.

"But you got no kids at 'ome!" remonstrated Tommy. (Ameliar was now in
service.)

Shovel turned on him with the fury of a mother protecting her young.
"Don't you try for to knock none on it out," he cried, and again fell
a-mumbling.

Said Tommy, scornfully: "If you says it all out at one bang you'll be
done at the start."

Shovel sighed.

"And you should blubber when yer says it," added Tommy, who could laugh
or cry merely because other people were laughing or crying, or even with
less reason, and so naturally that he found it more difficult to stop
than to begin. Shovel was the taller by half a head, and irresistible
with his fists, but to-night Tommy was master.

"You jest stick to me, Shovel," he said airily. "Keep a grip on my hand,
same as if yer was Elspeth."

"But what was we copped for, Tommy?" entreated humble Shovel.

Tommy asked him if he knew what a butler was, and Shovel remembered,
confusedly, that there had been a portrait of a butler in his father's
news-sheet.

"Well, then," said Tommy, inspired by this same source, "there's a room
a butler has, and it is a pantry, so you and me we crawled through the
winder and we opened the door to the gang. You and me was copped. They
catched you below the table and me stabbing the butler."

"It was me what stabbed the butler," Shovel interposed, jealously.

"How could you do it, Shovel?"

"With a knife, I tell yer!"

"Why, you didn't have no knife," said Tommy, impatiently.

This crushed Shovel, but he growled sulkily:

"Well, I bit him in the leg."

"Not you," said selfish Tommy. "You forgets about repenting, and if I
let yer bite him, you would brag about it. It's safer without, Shovel."

Perhaps it was. "How long did I get in quod, then, Tommy?"

"Fourteen days."

"So did you?" Shovel said, with quick anxiety.

"I got a month," replied Tommy, firmly.

Shovel roared a word that would never have admitted him to the hall.
Then, "I'm as game as you,