"I dunno, lad. I'm just weary with the sort of tired that you can't help by sleepin'. Understand?"
Pierre nodded, slowly, because he sympathized. "And the trouble?"
Branch stared about as if searching for a reason.
"Jack's up-stairs sulking; Patterson hasn't come home yet."
And Black Gandil, who heard all things, said without looking up: "A man that saves a ship-wrecked fellow, he gets bad luck for thanks."
Pierre turned a considering eye on him, and Gandil scowled back.
"You've been croaking for six years, Morgan, about the bad luck that would come to Jim from saving me out of the snow. It's never happened, has it?"
Gandil, snarling from one side of his mouth, answered: "Where's Patterson?"
"Am I responsible if the blockhead has got drunk some place?"
"Patterson doesn't get drunk—not that way. And he knows that we were to start again to-day."