“But what about your gray hairs?” Jerry demanded, tugging away at the oars.
“If you’ve more than one gray hair you’ve gray hairs,” said our man. “I have eleven.”
He ducked down his nice, dark, rumpled-up head for us to look, but I must say I couldn’t see more than one little one all buried among the black.
“You’re grown up, but you’re not old at all,” I said. “We’ve been imagining you as an aged old man with a long white beard.”
“I never mentioned a long white beard,” the Bottle Man said.
“Yes; but what about your tottering along on two sticks?” Jerry said suddenly.
But we had come alongside the catboat, and no one could talk for a little while until we were all arranged in the boat and our man had told Jerry and me to pull a mattressy thing out of the tiny little cabin and had laid Greg on it in the bottom of the boat. He gave him some stuff out of a little flasky bottle, too, and Greg sputtered over it and said “Ugh!” but afterward he said:
“It’s nice and hot inside when I thought it had gone.”
And we couldn’t talk, either, when our man was hoisting the orange-painted sail and hauling up the anchor and running back and forth to pull ropes and things. But when he was settled at the tiller and all of us were cosy with sweaters and coats, Jerry asked him again.
“Why, you see,” the Bottle Man said, “something had hit me very hard and for a long time all that I was able to do was to totter along on the two sticks.”