Explore "The Hand in the Dark" by Arthur J. Rees on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was so late that Ludgate Circus was deserted except for a ramshackle cab with a drunken driver pouring forth a hoarse story of a mean fare to a sleepy policeman leaning against a lamp post. The sight of two gentlemen on foot when all 'buses had stopped running for the night raised fleeting hopes in the cabman's pessimistic breast, and changed the flow of his narrative into a strident appeal for hire, based on the plea, which he called on the policeman to support, that he hadn't turned a wheel that night, and amplified with a profanity which only the friendliest understanding with the policeman could have permitted him to pour forth without fear of consequences.
He intimated his readiness to drive them anywhere between the _Angel_ on one side of London and the _Elephant_ on the other for three bob, or, being a bit of a sport, would toss them to make it five bob or nothing. The boundaries, he explained in a husky parenthesis, were fixed not so much by his own refusal to travel farther afield as by his horse's unwillingness to go into the blasted suburbs. As his importunities passed unregarded he damned them both with the terrible earnestness of his class, and rumbled back into his dislocated story with the languid policeman.