“Why, me and Jean Lafitte and the heartless jade. I told her you sent us to her to bid her seek your presence.”
“Jimmy! What on earth do you mean! That’s precisely the last thing I would have done—I haven’t done it. On the contrary——”
“I told her,” he resumed calmly, “that when Black Bart, the pirut, spoke, he spoke to be obeyed. She said, ‘I can’t go,’ and I said, ‘You gotta go.’”
“You, yourself, may now go and tell her that there has been a very bad mistake, Jimmy; and that she need not come.”
“An’ make her cry worse? I ain’t goin’ to do it!”
“Sir! This is mutiny!—But did she cry, Jimmy?”
“Yes. Awful. She said she was homesick. She ain’t. I don’t know what really is the matter. I ast Jean Lafitte, an’ he said maybe you’d know. We thought maybe it was something about yon varlet. Do you know?”
“No, I do not, Jimmy.” I found myself engaged in one of those detestable conversations where one knows the talk ought to end, yet dislikes to end it.
Jimmy stood for some time, much perturbed, looking every way but at me, and at last he blurted out.
“Don’t you just jolly well awfully love the fair captive, yon heartless jade—my Auntie Helen? Don’t you, Black Bart?”