Joe looked round him cautiously, although had there been any one by they could not have been seen, then he bent down.
“You’ll not tell Nan if I carry ye a bit, lad?” he asked. The child promised eagerly, and Joe swung him up in his arms.
“Here,” he said, pressing a soft lump into the child’s hands. “Even if you’re a witch’s brat ye mustn’t be hungered.”
Red bit into the bread that Joe had slipped into his pocket in his wife’s absence, and hugged the well-nigh suffocated kitten a little closer to his breast, while Joe, his head bent before the wind and rain, pushed on to the Ship.
CHAPTER VII
A LITTLE more than an hour after Joe Pullen and little Red Farren left the cottage, Mistress Amy sat by the fireside, sewing. The five children were asleep upstairs and everything was quiet. Opposite her in the chimney corner, his heavy rain-sodden boots smoking in the heat, sat Blueneck, his unshaven chin resting in his hands. On the table lay the woollen cap and heavy coat which he had thrown off on entering. The water which dripped off the skirts of the coat made a little puddle on the clean red and yellow bricks of the floor.
“You’re a kind man, Master Blueneck, to come trudging all this way in the soaking rain to cheer a poor woman whose husband is too surly to tell her of the doings of the Island,” said the lady, looking up from her mending, after a silence of a few minutes.
“Ah, señora.”
Mistress Pullen blushed with pleasure at the sound of the foreign address.
“Where on the Island is better company than yourself?” said the sailor gallantly, leaning a little forward so that the firelight played on the brass earrings that shone amongst the short oily curls hanging down the sides of his face.