“Give me that last copy of Lord Puffery’s Pin,” Lillehorne said. “I command it.”

“Command it!” barked Dippen Nack, who didn’t realize he had purchased a coat advertised as being trimmed with beaver when in fact it was brown-dyed street cur. The cherub cheeks of his bully-boy’s face seemed to pulse with excited blood stirred by the prospect of a street fight with a diminutive paperboy.

Nack’s outburst, however rough it sounded, brought forth only a slow blink from the lad and a resigned sigh from the assistant to London’s High Constable.

“I have determined,” said Lillehorne in a calmer tone to the subject of his obsession, “that I have paid for my last copy of the Pin. That is to say, as befits my position of authority—and responsibility—I expect some items in this city to be given to me freely and with good cheer. Your newssheet shall be one of them.”

“And why exactly should that be, sir?” dared ask the boy, with a defiant forward jutting of his chin.

“Simply because,” came the silkily spoken reply, “without the protection of the law to Lord Puffery’s business—and indeed to all the businesses in this fair city—he should see his Pins snatched away by ruffians at the very door of the printshop … if the printshop itself is not burned to ashes on the ground. We—I—am the sturdy wall of order that stands between Lord Puffery’s door—and every door you might look upon all along this street—and the evil tentacles of chaos. I assume you know the meaning of that—”

“Ah! At last I’ve found a Pin! Five pence here!” A round-bellied gent in a brown overcoat and a same-hued tricorn atop his own pile of wigcurlings had suddenly pushed his way onto the scene, namely the corner of Farringdon and Stonecutter streets a few blocks west of the Old Bailey, from which Lillehorne and Nack had emerged strutting and full of if not the flames of justice then the steady embers of avarice. The new arrival had silver pennies in one hand, offering them up, and was already reaching for the newssheet with the other.

“Hold! Hold!” Lillehorne nearly shouted, as if finding a Pin this day were like trying to pluck out a haystraw from a stack of needles.

“Hold, he says!” And to back up this statement came Nack’s wicked ebony billyclub, his favorite fiend. Nack plunged forward past Lillehorne like the devil’s pitchfork and put the pain-giving end of the club beneath the intruder’s descending terraces of chins. “You’ll not have it!” Nack snarled. “It’s already took!”

The gent staggered back on his polished bootheels. “This is … this is an outrage!” he sputtered, looking back and forth from one man to another and finding them both as ugly as toenail soup. “You have no claim on the paper! Where is your money, sir?”

“Here’s our roll a’dough!” Nack gave the man’s chins a thrust of the billyclub. “It’s good and solid, ya toad-faced warthog!”

“An outrage and an injury as well! I’m going for the law! There’s a constable hereabouts, I’m sure!”