"Well, bejabbers, this is your last scratch! You're a fine looking baste. You might have had a worse trip!" Mike addressed the steer, that baffled look on his face, and his eyes kindly.
When they did find themselves, anon, rightly upon the shore, they clustered there, masterless men. Jack asked: "What are we waiting here for?" His partner said: "I don't know," and swore. Somebody moved away, saying: "Come on, come on—what are we waiting here for?" and a few followed him.
"Where are you going?" he was asked.
He admitted that he did not know. A long, thin, grey-faced man drew nigh and stood beside the knot. Somebody took him into the conversation, half turning to him, but not looking at him, unaware that a stranger had joined them, and he answered, but not eagerly, quite casually. Thus he dropped into the talk: what kind of a trip had they had? what were they hanging around for? They didn't know. One of them asked if he was So-and-So, of Such-and-Such a boarding house? He admitted he was. Was he there still? He merely nodded—it was all very casual, but it seemed settled soon, seemed to be in the air somehow that they had arranged that they might as well bunk at his boarding house as anywhere else.
Then Candlass appeared on the wharf, wearing a white collar instead of the blue-and-white striped rubber one of the trip. Some of the men approached him, and he turned in his walk as a housemaster, one somewhat feared as a rule but respected, turns to hear what some boys would say to him, who have the air of wondering if they should approach at all on the day before breakup. He answered gently, easily, seemed to suggest by his manner that he would see them through as well as possible, but that even he was in the clutch of circumstance. It was with the hint of a shrug and with a little toss of the head and a half smile that he left them. The crowd formed afresh around those who had spoken to him.
"What does he say? What does he say?"
"Well," said Mike, sticking a hand under his belt, "we may as well drift up that way, then." "That way" was the Board of Trade Office.
"See you later on," said the boarding house man.
"Are you going away?" asked somebody, who perhaps felt homeless.
"Oh, I'll be back—I'll meet you up there."