“You see, arter this boy come on the island, Lion Ben he hires me and Joe Griffin, the next winter, to cut spars and clear land. Charlie Bell was a little, slender, half-starved, pitiful-looking creatur’, then, but he was willing and clever, and soon begun to pick up. Most of the winter he drove the team; but along in March, when it was bad hauling, he helped me chop. I tapped a maple, to have sap to drink while I was chopping. One day we comes into the woods arter dinner, and before we went to work, sot down by the sap tree, in the sun. I sets on a stump, same as where that stool is, and he on another, same as where that old gentleman is setting. I takes a good drink of the sap, and hands the dipper to him; says I, ‘Charlie, tell me your history, or part of it, like as you did Joe and Fred Williams.’ He didn’t want ter, but I coaxed him. Then he said, the way his father come to be pressed, was all through another man, that courted his mother when she was a gal, but she liked his father better; he couldn’t give her up, and allers hild that old grudge agin his father. He said his father had agreed to work for the government, and if he had only got his name on the roll, couldn’t have been touched any more than if he had been a peer of the kingdom. This feller, I forget his name—” “Robert Rankin,” said the basket-maker. “That’s it, old man, by jingo,—who thought, if he was out of the way, he could get her, after all,—told the press-gang, and they took him as he was on the road to the place where he would have been safe.”
The tears were streaming down John Bell’s cheeks, and his hands were lifted in gratitude to Heaven; but he would not interrupt Eaton by a question.
“He said, soon arter his father was gone, he was killed in an action, and his mother carried on the business for a while; but this feller kept prosecutin’ her, and wantin’ her to have him, till she couldn’t stand it any longer. So she packed up everything, and went to St. John’s, where she had a brother; but when she got there, he’d gone to furrin parts, and she took sick and died. Then the boy, destitute and wandering about the streets and docks to pick up a living, fell inter the hands of them are reprobates, thinking they were honest fishermen, and went cook for them. The rest you say you know. Good as a story-book—ain’t it?”
“Eaton,” said the captain, sternly, “this is Mr. Bell’s father.”
“His father! Then he wasn’t killed. I didn’t dream of that, or I shouldn’t have spoken like as I did. I see now he favors him.”
“Did he tell you,” asked the father, “what became of the other children?”
“I axed him if there was any more of ‘em. He said his mother’s relations took ‘em.”
There was an oppressive pause in the conversation after Eaton had gone forward. John Bell sat with his handkerchief over his face, while the others, respecting his emotions, were silent.
“No doubt, there can be none,” he said, at length, “that my poor wife is dead—God only knows what she suffered, in poverty and among strangers; that two of my children—whether alive or dead I know not—are in England, and that the other is in America. I may yet see him. I ought to be thankful for that.”