"Time passed and then come the twins, a boy and a girl, and Pelican was proud of the boy, for he had the Pelican nose, but old Bristow rose up in his wrath and said that they would have to go, and so Pelican and his wife come down into my neighborhood to live in a shanty-boat on the river, but they didn't git along, and fit and cussed from mornin' till night. Bristow come down to patch up matters. Pelican knocked him off the boat with an oar, and as he floundered out to the shore and wrung the water out of his whiskers he said, 'Fix yer own troubles--far'well.' Two weeks after the fight Mrs. Pelican Smith went back to live with her father and Pelican went into the fishin' and 'blind tiger' business. I had two new nets and a set of trot lines, and we bunched into a sort of partnership. I couldn't git him to say anything about his family or whether he wanted to see them again. But one night we set together on the shore. We had run out of bait and was tryin' to make plans to git some, as the lines was dry upon the shore and the fish would be runnin' with the gentle rise comin' in the river. We set on an old sycamore log together. The moon had just swung over the hill and I could see the white rim of it above the edge of Pelican's nose. "'Pelican,' I said, 'why don't you go back to your wife and children and try to live happy with them?' He made no answer and I pressed on him, 'Pelican, them two little twins air dependent on you, and if you had a little home to yourself, where the vines could run over your doorway and the birds sing in your own trees, with your wife and children beside you, your life would be happy--think of them, Pelican, your wife and children.'" "Pelican rose up, his face turned to the river. Ah, I had him at last thinking of his dear ones. "'What are you thinkin' of, Pelican?' "'I was thinkin' wher'n the hell we'd git that bait' said he." CHAPTER V "Did you ever eat a mussel, Shawn?" "No, sir, I didn't think they were good to eat." "Well, lots of things are made good to eat by the way you cook 'em. I want you to bale out the boat and we'll go up to the head of the bar and drop the grab-hooks along in shoal water and after we get a good dozen, small broilin' size, I'm goin' to show you how to cook 'em. A mussel, my boy, is a sort of lefthanded cousin to an oyster, only he lacks the salt water and a good many of the finer points; a right smart like a good many men, and I want to tell you another thing--one of the finest pearls that sold in a jewelry store in Cincinnati for fifteen hundred dollars, was taken from a mussel that come out of the Ohio river." "Luke Walters found it at Craig's bar," said Shawn. "The same," said Burney. "We might boil a bushel or two down and run a chance of finding somethin'; there's no tellin'. Git one of them lemons out of the box and the wire broiler and a stew-pan."