“I dare say she’s right, Tom. I never set up for a handsome man.”
“Like yonder ’venturer chap. He’s the sort as would please old smuggler Prawle’s lass.”
The angry flush came into the miner’s face again, but he mastered his annoyance, and said, rather hoarsely,—
“Hold your tongue, lad; the gentleman will hear what you say.”
“What’s that man doing up on the cliff?” said Geoffrey Trethick, who had walked down by the harbour in making a tour of his new home. “The one waving those things in his hands.”
“Sighting a school,” said Tom Jennen, in a sing-song tone, as, after the manner of sea-side men, he leaned his back against the stout rail which guarded the edge of the cliff.
“Sighting a school, eh? Of fish, of course?”
“Mack’,” said Tom Jennen, so curtly that he cut the word in half, and then proceeded to add to the brown stains at the corners of his mouth by hacking off a piece of tobacco with his big knife.
“They do it in partnership like, sir,” said the miner, eagerly, as he gazed in the new-comer’s face, as if attracted by the sound of the word “adventurer.”
“One of them goes up on the highest part of the cliff yonder, Pen Dwavas that is, and he watches till he sees a school coming.”