“What does he want? Coppers, of course. He’s a beggar.”
“Well, he doesn’t look like one. No, that isn’t it. He’s got a boat somewhere, and wants to take us up the river for a row. Shall we go?”
“No; it’s too hot. Think we could buy an umbrella somewhere?”
“What for? It looks as if it had not rained here for a twelvemonth.”
“Keep the sun off.”
“Oh, I see. Come along, then, till we get to those stores, and we can buy one there, I daresay; but I shan’t walk with you if you put it up. Bother you and your umbrella! Are you afraid you’ll melt?”
“I am melting.”
As Dean spoke very surlily, “that sailor,” as Mark called him, a little stumpy fellow who looked as though he should have been plump and rosy, but who was ghastly pale instead, sauntered up slowly, looking very hard at Mark, and opened his lips as if to say something, but closed them again as if with an effort.
He was dressed in a sailor’s canvas frock and loose trousers, both of which articles of attire were old and shabby but scrupulously clean, while his hat, a very old straw, showed an ugly rent which its owner had apparently tried to hide by means of the silken band just above its brim. But the band had slipped upwards so that a good-sized patch of crisp, curly, black hair had escaped and thrust its way out into the sun.
As the man came abreast, he opened his lips and closed them twice before passing on, and in the sultry stillness of the sleepy place they heard him give a faint sigh.