“Bully for you!” exclaimed Mr Lathrope. “We’ll go rabbit-hunting, mister, as soon as you please. If there wer one thing I liked in the old country it wer rabbit-pie, and it kinder made me lonesome to think I’d never fix my grinders through another ’fore I got played out!”
“I’ve heard, too,” continued Mr Meldrum, “that there’s a very fine sort of tern or duck here that is good eating; and I fancy I saw a brace fly across the creek the other day. We might come across some!”
“If we dew,” said the American complacently, tapping the barrel of the old rifle he had brought ashore as his most valued possession, and spoken of as the gift of his deceased grandfather, “I guess Colonel Crockett haar ken give a sorter good account of ’em. When I draws a bead with that thaar rifle, mister, what I shoot at’s as good as a gone coon!”
“I hope you’ll have plenty of practice with it then, to the advantage of our dinner-table,” replied Mr Meldrum pleasantly, preparing for the expedition by loading carefully a double-barrelled gun which he too had saved from amongst the various goods and chattels he had left on board the wreck. “You can have all the rabbits I kill if you let me have the ducks.”
“That’s a bargain, mister,” said Mr Lathrope; “though I guess you’ll gain by the swop.”
“Sure and it sames to me you’re both countin’ your chickens afore they’re hatched,” observed the first-mate with a huge grin at his own joke.
“You’re not far wrong, Mr McCarthy,” said Mr Meldrum. “I, for one, don’t expect to come back overladen with game; but of course I can’t answer for my friend here, who may be another American ‘Deerslayer,’ for all I can tell, though he’ll find rabbits his biggest quarry on this island.”
“Sir,” retorted Mr Lathrope, “I ain’t goin’ to let out all I ken dew, fur a leaky sieve’s gen’rally bad for holdin’ water, I guess; but, you jest wait and see what you jest see!”
“Arrah sure and we will, sorr,” said Mr McCarthy, bursting into a regular roar of laughter, in which Mr Meldrum and the others joined—Mrs Major Negus being especially prominent in her merriment, as she always was when anything was said to the American’s disadvantage, he being apparently her direct antipathy. “But I hope, sorr, though it goes agin my own counthry to say it, what you bring back won’t be as much as Paddy shot at.”
“You slide along with your durned brogue,” was all the retort that Mr Lathrope condescended to make to this hit. It touched him, however, on his tenderest point, for he certainly prided himself on his proficiency in the use of “the lethal weapon;” so, when he turned round and observed that Master Snowball had heard the remark and was indulging in a quiet guffaw at his expense, he rounded on him a little more sharply. “I guess you’d better stow that, you ugly cuss!” said he menacingly; “or else I’ll soon make you rattle your ivories to another toon!” Whereupon the darkey reduced his grin to a proper focus and endeavoured to look as grave as he could.