"Oh, you needn't apologize for that," said Gus, as soon as he could speak. "I hate him as heartily as you do."
"And hain't I got good reason to hate him?" asked Barlow, elevating his wooden leg above the counter. "Just look at that! Wasn't he a nice cove to go and wing me and set me to stumping around on this thing all the rest of my days?"
Gus was well acquainted with the circumstances to which the man referred, and knew that he richly deserved the punishment he had received. In the years gone by Barlow had been a sailor, and had on one occasion shipped on a vessel commanded by Captain Nellis. He was so very turbulent that he was kept in irons almost half his time; and once, just after he was released from a long confinement, he, without the slightest provocation, attacked the mate of the vessel so fiercely, and with such evident intention to do him some serious injury, that the captain, in order to save his officer, disabled the ruffian with a ball from his pistol which shattered the bone and rendered amputation necessary. Barlow never forgave his captain for that; and, moreover, when he once got started on the subject he never seemed to be able to stop talking about it.
"I ask you wasn't he a nice fellow to go and do that?" continued the old man, growing more and more enraged the longer he dwelt upon it. "But for him I might to-day 'a 'been the master of as fine a vessel as ever sailed; but here I am, laid up in ordinary, trying to turn an honest penny by keepin' a sailors' boarding-house."
"And turning many a dishonest one by being a land-shark," thought Gus.
"I hate the whole tribe—every one that bears the name of Nellis," the old man went on, fiercely. "If I had my way I'd sweep them all off the earth."
"So would I," said Gus, heartily.
"Now, I'll tell you what's gospel," continued Barlow, leaning over the counter toward his visitor and sinking his voice almost to a whisper—"is that son of his coming here this summer?"
Gus replied that he was.
"Well, if men are as scarce as they were last year he had better keep himself close, or he'll make out the tail-end of a crew as sure as I can get my hands on him."