Billiard Bob and the Moorhen

A moorhen came skip-scratching across the sideways, a worm worming in its beak. Such spectacles were common, especially on a cold to febrile September moorhen-morning. No neither a Captain Courageous nor a Billiard Bob was there to sway and connive the Moorish-hen from its ownmost, pickling as it did a peck across the ashtop blackening. He eyed the moorhen, drawing a bead on the top of its head. He spread his fingers and heaved it at the hen’s head, the ball-bearing pinging against its cockscomb. The bird fell crumpling to the ashtop, its beak bobbling into the wattle of its neck. Billiard Bob, bashful as he was, asked Captain Courageous for a quoin to stele the doorjamb proper. (He figured that by stealing the stele he might stave off a moorhen to a dozen, all of which had made a circle around the millinery and barrow).‘There is nothing more insufferable than useless suffering’ said Billiard Bob morosely. ‘Moorhens--as is common knowledge—live useless lives’, so putting an end to they’re insufferable suffering seems like the humane thing to do’. Captain Courageous tucked in his shirt and sighed, a dribble of chaw-puck creasing the ebb and flow of his face. He said nothing, at most very little, preferring silence to gibbeting and jabber. When he’d finished telling the story of Captain Courageous and Billiard Bob, which took 27 ½ minutes, the man in the hat excused himself and ambled cross-footed up the sideways backwards, his pork-pie hat clenched tightly under his arm.