These pauses took up a good deal of time, so that it was about one o’clock when we reached Uggleston’s cottage, and, as it happened, just as its tenant was coming up from his boat, having just landed from some expedition along the coast.
He was not alone, for old Binnacle Bill, as we called him, was behind, carrying the oars and the mast with the little sail twisted round, so as to put them in Uggleston’s lean-to shed.
As we drew nearer I began to wonder what sort of a reception we were going to receive from old Jonas Uggleston; and it struck me very forcibly then, how strange it seemed that he should be the father of my school-fellow, who was always well dressed, that is as school-boys are, while he was just like an ordinary fisherman of the coast, with rough flannel trousers rolled up, big fisherman’s boots, blue worsted shirt, and an otter-skin cap, from beneath which his grisly hair stuck out in an untended mass, while his beard, that was more grisly still, half covered his dark-brown face.
He was a stern, fierce-looking man, with large dark eyes that seemed to ferret out everything one was thinking about, and as he came up he looked at us all searchingly in turn.
“Hallo, father! Been along the coast?” cried Bigley, striding up to him; and there was just a faint kind of smile on Jonas Uggleston’s face as his son shook hands and then took his arm in a way that seemed to come like a surprise to me, for it seemed so curious that my school-fellow Bigley could like that fierce, common-looking man.
“Hallo, Big!” growled old Jonas grimly, “keeping your holidays then. Who’ve you got here? Oh! It’s you, young Chowne, is it? Ah! I was coming over to see your father ’bout my foot as I got twisted ’tween two bits o’ rock—jumping; but it’s got better now. Home from school?”
“Yes, sir; we came home yesterday,” said Bob, staring hard at old Uggleston’s mahogany hands.
“And who’s this, eh? Oh, young Cap’n Duncan, eh?” continued the old fellow, turning to me as if he were not sure. “So you’ve come home from school, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” I said; “I came with them yesterday.”
“Well, I know that, don’t I?” he said sharply. “Think folk as don’t go to school don’t know nothing, eh?”