“Face? Clean?” he said, passing his dirty hand over his dingy countenance. “Ain’t it clean now?”
I burst into a roar of laughter, for the poor fellow’s face was not only thoroughly grubby, but decorated with two good-sized smudges of tar.
“You mean it’s dirty, Mr Nat,” he said seriously. “All right; I’ll go and scrub it.”
The next minute he was down on his knee at the water’s edge scooping up a handful of muddy sand and, as he termed it, scrubbing away as if he would take off all the skin, and puffing and blowing the while like a grampus, while the carpenter looked on as much amused as I. But he turned serious directly, and with an earnest look in his eyes he said:
“Thank you for what you said, Mr Nat, sir. You shan’t find me ungrateful.”
I nodded, and walked away to join my uncle, for I always hated to be talked to like that.
Uncle Dick had his small case open, with its knife; cotton-wire, thread, and bottle of preserving cream, and when I joined him where he was seated he had already stripped the skin off one of the birds, and was painting the inside cover with the softened paste; while a few minutes later he had turned the skin back over a pad of cotton-wool, so deftly that, as the feathers fell naturally into their places and he tied the legs together, it was hard to believe that there was nothing but plumage, the skin, and a few bones.
“Open the case,” he said, and as I did so he laid his new specimen upon a bed of cotton-wool, leaving room for the other bird, and went on skinning in the quick clever way due to long practice.
“It doesn’t take those two fellows long to settle down, Nat,” he said, as he went on.
“No, uncle,” I replied, as I turned my eyes to where the boy had given himself a final sluice and was now drying his face and head pounce-powder fashion. That is to say, after the manner in which people dried up freshly-written letters before the days of blotting-paper. For the boy had moved to a heap of dry sand and with his eyes closely shut was throwing that on his face and over his short hair.