“Yes, Edward, I believe you feel that it is. Well, Instow, he says he has been accustomed to outdoor life with his father from boyhood. His father was a gamekeeper and woodman. That he can shoot, fish, clean guns, manage nets, ride, sail boats, punt and row. Do everything, including building huts and cooking.”
“Don’t want any cooking. I shall do that myself.”
“In addition, he can skin birds and beasts.”
“Ha!” ejaculated the doctor. “Well, if we engage a stranger, we don’t know how he’ll turn out, and it would be very awkward to have a man who would turn tail at the first bit of discomfort. Look here, sir, it will be a rough life.”
“If you only knew, doctor, how hungry I am for a bit of rough outdoor time, you’d put in a word for me,” cried the man excitedly.
“And suppose we get in a hot corner, and have to fight for our lives against black fellows?”
There was a grim look in the man’s face at once—a regular British bull-dog aspect, as he tightened his lips, and made wrinkles at the corners, as if putting his mouth in a parenthesis, and then he began to tuck up his cuffs and double his fists.
“That will do, Edward,” said the doctor quietly. “We know him, Meadows, for a steady, straightforward fellow, sound in wind and limb, who has never given me a job since he tried to cut his hand off with a bit of glass. What he don’t know he’d soon learn; and I should say that we are not likely to get a more suitable fellow if we tried for six months.”
Edward’s face was a study, as he glanced at Jack, and then turned to gaze imploringly at his master as if he were a judge about to utter words upon which his life depended.
“That will do, Edward, you may leave the room.”