“You’ve dropped it,” cried Vince. “Lift up.”
Mike raised his hand, and there, sure enough, was the lizard’s tail, writhing like a worm, and apparently as full of life as its late owner, but, not being endowed with feet, unable to escape.
“Poor little wretch!” said Vince; “how horrid! But he has got away.”
“Without his tail!”
“Yes; but that will soon grow again.”
“Think so?”
“Why, of course it will: just as a crab’s or lobster’s claw does.”
“Hullo, young gentlemen!” said a gruff voice, and a thick-set, elderly man stopped short to look down upon them, his grim, deeply-lined brown face twisted up into a smile as he took off an old sealskin cap and began to softly polish his bald head, which was surrounded by a thick hedge of shaggy grey hair, but paused for a moment to give one spot a rub with his great rough, gnarled knuckles. His hands were enormous, and looked as if they had grown into the form most suitable for grasping a pair of oars to tug a boat against a heavy sea.
His dress was exceedingly simple, consisting of a coarsely-knitted blue jersey shirt that might have been the great-grandfather of the one Vince wore; and a pair of trousers, of a kind of drab drugget, so thick that they would certainly have stood up by themselves, and so cut that they came nearly up to the man’s armpits, and covered his back and chest, while the braces he wore were short in the extreme. To finish the description of an individual who played a very important part in the lives of the two island boys, he had on a heavy pair of fisherman’s boots, which might have been drawn up over his knees, but now hung clumsily about his ankles, like those of smugglers in a penny picture, as he stood looking down grimly, and slowly resettled his sealskin cap upon his head.
“What are you two a-doing of?” he asked. “Nothing,” said Mike shortly.