“The boy you picked up at sea,” resumed Luttrell, courteously, “and who
will be proud to renew his acquaintance with you more pleasantly than it
opened.”
“Well, young ‘um, you have got a jollier colour on your cheeks now than
when we saw you bobbing behind that bit of broken jib-boom! You was
blue, that’s a fact, but I’m a raw Eastern if you was bluer than the
lawyer!”
Poor Mr. M’Kinlay! scarcely had one shame overcome him when came the
terror of another; for now, for the first time, did he recognise in the
Yankee the terrible tourist of the Welsh mountains. A vague something
wonld cross him as he lay in the lugger, sea-sick and miserable, that
the horrid voice, and the horrid look, and the horrid gesture of his
fellow-traveller, were not encountered for the first time; but he was
too full of his own sorrows to waste a thought on such speculations, and
it was only now, as they sat at the same board, eating of the same dish,
and hob-nobbing together, that the measure of his conviction became
full. “He doesn’t know--he cannot know me!” muttered he, “and I have
only one blunder to atone for, but who could have thought it was his
son!” He turned to engage Harry in conversation, to inquire into his
habits, his tastes, and his amusements, but the boy, fascinated by
the Yankee’s discourse, could not bear to lose a word of it.
Dodge--“Gen’ral” he called himself, as he spoke of those days--Gen’ral
Dodge had served in many of the wars of the South American Republic; he
had been with Bolivar, and against him; he had made and lost his fortune
three successive times, had taken part in a buccaneer expedition
to Mexico, was imprisoned and condemned to death, and saved by an
earthquake that left the gaol and one quarter of Santa Fé in ruins. As
to his shipwrecks and adventures with pirates, his hunting exploits,
his raids either with Indians or against them, they were legion; and
certainly, to these narratives he imparted a “gusto” and an expression
which gave them a marvellous power, occasionally corroborated as they
were by material evidence, as when he showed where he had lost the thumb
and two fingers of his left hand, the terrible cicatrix in the back of
his head from an Indian’s attempt to scalp him, and the mark of a bullet
which had traversed his body from the neck to the opposite collar-bone.
There was no disbelieving a man whose every joint and limb could come
into court as his witnesses, not to say that he was one of those men
whom few love to contradict. If he were, at some times, rather boastful
on the score of his courage and daring, he was, at others, equally frank
as to his short-comings in honesty, and he told with an astonishing
frankness of some acts which, had they not been committed in unsettled
and semi-civilised lands, would worthily have been requited by the
galleys.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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