A corner of the curtain was raised, and a man appeared, carrying a small bottle of liquor—so Darke inferred from the words he had just heard.
“Well, stranger, how do you feel?” said he, approaching the hunter. “I reckon you got a right smart of a swat along side yer poll with that ar’ twig out yender. I shouldn’t wonder if it’d ’a’ splintered when it struck terry-firmy if you hadn’t ’a’ happened along jest in the nick o’ time to break its fall. I was a witness of the lamentationable catastofy, and see the stick when it broke off; but I obsarved that ’twas bound to fall, and knowin’ I couldn’t stop its wild career, I let it fall; and then started to go to you, but I had to stop and watch that ar’ pup o’ your’n. He’s a nation cute plant, he is, and I reckoned he was a-goin’ to snake you home; but after awhile he give up and started off for help. Then I went out and picked you up and brought you here and laid you out. Here, take a little pull at the whis’. It’ll kinder regulate yer pulse, set yer heart in stidy operation and ile up yer thinkin’ merchine. Don’t say a word. I ain’t ready for you to talk yet, and, besides, I don’t b’lieve as how you’re a nat’ral talker anyhow. Now I’m a nat’ral-born talker. When I was an infant and didn’t weigh but fourteen pounds, my uncle Peter informed my ma that he thought I’d become a preacher or an auctioneer with the proper advantages—and my uncle Peter was a physionologist and a powerful judge of live-stock!”
Darke took the flask, drank some of its contents, and handed it back to the man, whom he had been regarding attentively from head to foot all the while he had been speaking.
He was very tall—nearer seven feet than six—and his frame was massive in proportion. He was, to judge from his face, which was partially obscured by a thin growth of sandy beard, thirty-five years of age, though one might easily have called him five years older or five years younger. He had pale watery-blue eyes; a capacious mouth, from which projected the points of a few large, scraggy teeth; very high and sharp cheek-bones; enormous ears; long, sunken jaws, with hollow cheeks, and a high, sloping forehead, blowing about which, and streaming down his back, were a few long, thin locks of red hair, escaping from beneath the rim of a battered and dirty old silk hat that had once been white, though evidently a good while since.
This ancient tile was secured to the giant’s great head by means of a light strap of deer-skin, which was lost to view under his chin among his sparse, bristling whiskers.
He was dressed in a fur garment, part coat, part pantaloons, that enveloped his entire person from his chin to his feet, which were enormously large, and incased in a pair of cowhide boots that looked, so extensive were they, and at the same time so old, as if they might have seen service, in the removal of the baggage of the patriarchal Noah and his sons and daughters from the family mansion to the ark, when they were compelled to pull up stakes and emigrate at the time of the universal deluge.
“Where am I? Who are you?”
This Darke asked after the “natural talker” had stopped to take breath.
“Why, stranger, or Mr. Darke, I might say—for I’ve known you by sight this four year—you’re right here, and safe, I reckon. I’ve lived here six years, and I’ve never seen any r’al ginewine ghosts yet. I’m Leander Maybob, formerly of Maybob Center, down in old Massachusetts. If I was real up in etiquette, I s’pose I’d ’a’ introduced myself afore; but I ain’t polite. Now my uncle Peter was a master polite man. I remember once, when he went down to Bosting to sell his wool—wool was ’way down that season, he lost on that wool awful—and got kinder turned ’round like. Well, he kept wanderin’ all over for a right smart of a while, but he couldn’t nohow see his way clear back to the ‘Full Bottle Inn’—he was a-puttin’ up there. My uncle Peter was a master polite man, and didn’t consider it proper to speak to folks as hadn’t been introducted to him, and so he kept right on wanderin’ about without inquirin’ the way till late in the afternoon, when he begun to experience the gnawin’ pangs of an empty stummick; and he made up his mind as ’twould be better to be guilty of a breach of politeness than to starve. But he wasn’t quite certain, and so he took out his etiquette book—he always carried one, my uncle Peter did, Deacon Checkerfield’s, I believe—and looked to see if there was any rules touchin’ this very peculiar case o’ his’n. Well, he set down on a bar’l in a shed, for ’twas a-rainin’ hard by this time, and studied his book till it got so dark he couldn’t see to read any longer, and then he concluded to break etiquette or bu’st. Etiquette was a master fine thing, he argu’d, the very foundation o’ society; but ’twasn’t hardly the thing for an empty stummick. So he got up and went into a big house right across the way. Here he see a feller as looked kinder nat’ral. ‘Pardin,’ sez he, ‘your countenance looks f’miliar.’ He made a master bow as he spoke. ‘Will you be so kind as to tell me the way to go to the Full Bottle Inn?’ ‘’Tain’t no way in p’tickler’, sez the feller. ‘Beg pardon,’ sez my uncle Peter. He was a master polite man. ‘But I want to know how fur ’tis to the Full Bottle Inn.’ ‘’Tain’t no distance at all,’ sez the feller, ‘It’s right here.’ My uncle give in and begged the feller’s pardon—he was a master polite man, my uncle Peter was. He’d been settin’ right in front of the inn for hours studyin’ his etiquette book, cause he didn’t know nobody to ask. He didn’t tell of it for five years afterward.”
At this moment the curtain which divided the cavern was pushed back at one side, and another person advanced toward Darke and his Titanic companion.