“You can’t deny it, Rhoda!” I sings out, feeling vexed indeed.
Then she turns round from her blackberrying, and I spied a tear in the corner of her eye. So I knew what I said was the cause of her hiding her head, and I held my tongue, being ashamed.
As we was walking homeward, later on, the brace of us tongue-tied and melancholy as an albatross before a cyclone comes on, Rhoda whispers in my ear, “Can’t you trust a girl’s wit? I’m a match for any two of ’em!”
“Right, sweetheart!” says I, gripping her hand. For all that, a notion, indeed, crossed my brain, “that she who is better than two mayn’t be good enough to tackle three.” And so it proved.
Well, mates, it might have been two or three days later on that I chanced to be in Barmouth, and there, in the porch of “The Wynn Arms,” I came into collision, as you might say, with one Evan Evans, an old shipmate of mine, who worked on the Anna Maria Sett alongside of me, and could handle a pick as cleverly as our boatswain the rope’s-end. Evan, indeed, when he claps eyes on me, sings out, right cheerily, “A drain of grog, my boy!”
“With you,” I answers, “Evan, yes, indeed!”
So we turns into the bar-parlour of “The Wynn Arms,” and he orders two goes of rum punch, hot.
When we was sat down comfortable, I began to twig, d’ye see, that his rig was that of a seafaring man. His arms was tattooed, and his kit looked smart.
“Avast!” I sings out,—“avast, Evan Evans! Surely, you’ve never joined the horse-marines?”
“Mate,” he replies, giving me a slap on the shoulder, like a true seaman, “there’s a better mine, containing richer mineral than the old Anna Maria, and that’s the open sea!”