“I’m Phil Boldrick’s pal from Danger Mountain.” Roscoe held out his hand, and the man took it, saying: “You’re The Padre, I suppose, and Phil was soft on you. Didn’t turn religious, did he? He always had a streak of God A’mighty in him; a kind of give-away-the-top-of-your-head chap; friend o’ the widow and the orphan, and divvy to his last crust with a pal. I got your letter, and come over here straight to see that he’s been tombed accordin’ to his virtues; to lay out the dollars he left me on the people he had on his visitin’ list; no loafers, no gophers, not one; but to them that stayed by him I stay, while prog and liquor last.”
I saw Roscoe looking at him in an abstracted way, and, as he did not reply, I said: “Phil had many friends and no enemies.” Then I told him the tale of his death and funeral, and how the valley mourned for him.
While I spoke he stood leaning against a tree, shaking his head and listening, his eyes occasionally resting on Roscoe with a look as abstracted and puzzled as that on Roscoe’s face. When I had finished he drew his hand slowly down his beard and a thick sound came from behind his fingers. But he did not speak.
Then I suggested quietly that Phil’s dollars could be put to a better use than for prog and liquor.
He did not reply to this at all; but after a moment’s pause, in which he seemed to be studying the gambols of a squirrel in a pine tree, he rubbed his chin nervously, and more in soliloquy than conversation said: “I never had but two pals that was pals through and through. And one was Phil and the other was Jo—Jo Brackenbury.”
Here Roscoe’s hand, which had been picking at the bark of a poplar, twitched suddenly.
The man continued: “Poor Jo went down in the ‘Fly Away’ when she swung with her bare ribs flat before the wind, and swamped and tore upon the bloody reefs at Apia.... God, how they gnawed her! And never a rag holdin’ nor a stick standin’, and her pretty figger broke like a tin whistle in a Corliss engine. And Jo Brackenbury, the dandiest rip, the noisiest pal that ever said ‘Here’s how!’ went out to heaven on a tearing sea.”
“Jo Brackenbury—” Roscoe repeated musingly. His head was turned away from us.
“Yes, Jo Brackenbury; and Captain Falchion said to me” (I wonder that I did not start then) “when I told him how the ‘Fly Away’ went down to Davy, and her lovers went aloft, reefed close afore the wind—‘Then,’ says he, ‘they’ve got a damned sound seaman on the Jordan, and so help me! him that’s good enough to row my girl from open sea, gales poundin’ and breakers showin’ teeth across the bar to Maita Point, is good enough for use where seas is still and reefs ain’t fashionable.’”
Roscoe’s face looked haggard as it now turned towards us. “If you will meet me,” he said to the stranger, “to-morrow morning, in Mr. Devlin’s office at Viking, I will hand you over Phil Boldrick’s legacy.”