I made no answer, but frowned very much at his presumption.
“—Because, everybody else does. She’s nice. I should think you would. I do, I know mighty well.”
“She is—she is—she’s a very estimable young woman, Jimmy,” said I, coloring. “I think I may say that without compromising myself.”
“Then why do you hurt her feelings the way you do—when she’s plumb gone on you, the way she is?”
I sprang toward him to clap a hand over his garrulous mouth, but he evaded me, and spoke from behind the bathroom door. “Well, she is! Don’t I hear her sticking up for you all the time—didn’t I hear her an’ Auntie Lucinda havin’ a reg’lar row over it again, ‘I don’t care if he hasn’t got a cent!’ says she.”
“But yon varlet is rich,” said I.
“She didn’t mean yon varlet—she meant you, I’m pretty sure, Black Bart. An’ she’s been feedin’ Partial all the afternoon—say, he’s the shape of a sausage.”
“She is heartless, Jimmy! Little do you know the ways of a heartless jade—she wants to win away from me the last thing on earth I have—even my dog. That’s all. Now, Jimmy, you must go.”
But he emerged only in part from his shelter. “So Jean Lafitte an’ me, we looked it up in the book; an’ it says where the heartless jade is brought before the pirut chief, ‘How now, fair one!’ says he, an’ he bends on her the piercin’ gaze o’ his iggle eye: ‘how now, wouldst spurn me suit?’ The fair captive she bends her head an’ stands before him unable to encounter his piercin’ gaze, an’ for some moments a deep silence prevails——”
“Jimmy!” I heard a clear voice calling along the deck. No answer, and Jimmy raised a hand to command silence of me also.