“Yes,” said Luttrell, taken suddenly off his guard, “they occupied me many very sad days and nights. They were labours that lightened sorrow, and took me away from cares that were eating into my heart.”
“Ah! and how much better you’d have been, stranger, if you’d ha’ been doin’ something genuine useful, something to make yourself and others more comfortable, and not a grubbin’ after old shoe-buckles and saints’ shinbones. Well, you don’t think so! No matter; that’s our way o’ lookin’ at it. Now to business. There’s just one thing in these diggins that has tuk my fancy. It’s the only thing here that I’d give a red cent for, on my own account; but I do like it wonderful. I don’t suppose you’ll let me have it to buy, but if you’ll jist give a loan of it, we’ll say for a year or two—two years—I’ll close the deal, and give you your first price, fifteen hundred dollars.”
Luttrell’s dark face lighted up at the prospect of relief from much embarrassment, and his eyes ranged over the room to see what it possibly could be that had captivated his strange visitor’s fancy. A few gaffs, a single-barrel gun, and some fishing-taekle, were in one corner, and a pair of high sealskin boots in another, and a rough wolflike “lurcher” lay under the table—could it be any of these? It was scarcely credible, and yet the American had seen none other—he had walked straight from the landing-place to the Abbey. “What signifies what it is?” said Luttrell to himself. “It is the caprice of an unlettered fellow, who would, perhaps, care more for a tobacco-pouch than for my ‘Book of the Four Gospels.’”
“I have no doubt that I shall accept your offer, and gladly accept it” said Luttrell; “but it would gratify me if you were to say what it is that you desire to possess.”
“It’s then just as likely you’d refuse me.”
“And I mistake you much if, in such a case, you’d hold me to my bargain!”
For the first time the American’s features brightened; the dull leaden cheek coloured, and the firm-set thin lip curved into a pleasant smile as he said, “You’re right there, Britisher—you’re right there. I’d not ha’ clinched the nail, if I saw it was goin’ to fester you! Here’s how it is, then,” and he drew a long breath to give him courage—“here’s how it is—I want your ‘buoy.’”
“My what?”
“Your buoy; your son!”
“You want my son,” said Luttrell, drawing himself up, and looking with an air of haughty insolence. “Have you forgotten, Sir, which side of the Atlantic you are standing on, and that you are no longer in a land where men deal in their fellow-men? Or is it that, presuming on what poverty you have seen here, you dare to insult me with a proposal your own mean whites would have resented with a bowie-knife?”