The pair looked at each other. Horble's hand felt for the gin again. His speech had grown a little thick. He was angry and flustered, and a dull resentment was mantling his heavy face.
"I'll go the schooner," cried Gregory. "The Northern Light as she lies there this minute, not a dollar owing on her bottom, with two hundred pounds of specie in her safe. Lock, stock, and barrel, she's yours!"
Horble shook his head.
"Madge ain't for sale," he said.
"Please yourself," said Gregory. "You'll end by losing her for nothing."
"Captain Cole," said Horble, "Madge has told me how near it was a go between you and her, and how, if you hadn't cleared out so sudden the way you did, she would have married you in spite of old Blanchard. But when you went away like that you left the field clear, and you mustn't bear me no malice for having stepped in and taken your leavings. What's done's done, and it's a sorry game to come back too late and insult a man who never did you no harm."
"Oh!" said Gregory.
"If you choose," continued Horble in his tone of wounded reasonableness, "you can make a power of mischief between me and Madge. I don't think it comes very well from you to do it; I don't think anything that calls himself a man would do it; least of all a genelman like yourself, whom we all respeck and look up to. Captain Cole, if you've lost Madge, you know you can only blame yourself."
"I don't call her lost," said Gregory.
"Captain Cole," said Horble, calmly but with a quiver of his lip, "we'll take another drink and then we'll say good-by."