This gentleman smiled, grunted, placed a fresh bit of black tobacco in his cheek, and took notice of the fact that several of the boys had made a rush to the edge of the water by the harbour and come back loaded with decaying fish—scraps of skate, trimmings, especially the tails, heads, and offal—to take their places again, standing behind their sitting companions.
Someone else saw the action too, and began to descend from the cliff by the long slope whose water end was close to the shore end of the pier.
This personage would have been a tall, broad-shouldered man had he been all there; but he was not, for he had left his legs in the West Indies, off the coast of Martinique, when a big round shot from a French battery came skipping over the water and cut them off, as the ship’s surgeon said, almost as cleanly as he could have done with the knife and saw he used on the poor fellow after the action was over, the fort taken, and the Frenchmen put to flight.
The result was that Thomas Bodger came back after some months to his native village, quite cured, in the best of health, and wearing a pair of the shortest wooden legs ever worn by crippled man—his pegs, as the boys of Rockabie called them, though he dignified them himself by the name of toes. As to his looks, he was a fine-looking man to just below his hips, and there he had been razed, as he called it to Aleck Donne, while the most peculiar thing about him as he toddled along was what at first sight looked like a prop, which extended from just beneath his head nearly to the ground, as if to enable him to stand, tripod-fashion, steadily on a windy day. But it was nothing of the sort, being only his pigtail carefully bound with ribbon, and the thickest and longest pigtail in the “Ryal Navee.”
Tom Bodger, or—as he was generally known by the Rockabie boys—Dumpus, trotted down the slope in a wonderful way, for how he managed to keep his balance over the rough cobbles and on the storm-worn granite stones of the pier was a marvel of equilibrium. But keep upright he did, solely by being always in motion; and he was not long in elbowing his way through the crowd of boys, many of whom overtopped him, and planting himself at the top of the pier steps, where from old experience he knew that Aleck would land.
As soon as he was there he delivered himself of an observation.
“Look here,” he growled, in a deep, angry voice, “I’ve been marking o’ you youngsters with my hye, and I gives you doo warning, the fust one on yer as shies any o’ that orfull at young Master Donne, or inter his little boat, I marks with what isn’t my hye, but this here bit of well-tarred rope’s-end as I’ve got hitched inside my jacket; so look out.”
“Yah!” came in a derisive chorus, as the sailor showed the truthfulness of his assertion by drawing out about eighteen inches of stoutish brown rope, drawing it through his left hand and putting it back.
“Yah!” shouted one of the most daring. “Yer can’t ketch us. Yah!”
“Not ketch ye, you young swab? Not in a starn chase, p’raps, but I’ve got a good mem’ry and I can heave-to till yer comes within reach, and then—well, I’m sorry for you, my lad. I know yer;—Davvy, Davvy.”