"Well, it's time to start. Cook'll give you your rations. Come, now! Good-bye, my men. Don't forget to bring those horses. We shall expect you by daybreak on Saturday." (We had gone ashore on a Monday.)
"Yessir, you expect us, sir," answered Tomkins.
The men took their rations from the Cook, then they one and all paid a last visit to the bushes to seek for a few more guavas before they left us, and then, with a hang-dog nod and touch of their caps, they took up their straggling march. We sat watching them as they moved westward in a wavering line.
"It must be very hard work walking up that beach," said Cynthia. "Did you remark what a difficult time Bill Ware had to get pointed straight, Uncle Tony?"
The Skipper and I sat and watched them. There was no need to answer Cynthia. The men made a line as straight as the fences which we were beginning to use about Belleville. The idea came from Virginia. We called them Virginia rail fences. As the last man of them staggered round the point and was lost behind the trunks of the cocoanut grove, the Skipper arose and approached the thicket where the mango tree stood. I followed a close second, and Cynthia came behind.
"I thought as much!" exclaimed the Skipper. He had parted the bushes and stood looking downward. I gazed over his shoulder, and Cynthia condescended to stand on tiptoe and cast her eyes over mine.
"What is it, Uncle Tony?" asked she.
"Those blanked rascals! In the confusion, Jones, do you see? Broke into my store-room, of course. I wanted to bring some myself, but it's never safe with such a crew. Got that at Santo Domingo for medicinal purposes. Wish to Heaven it would physic them all! Darned if I don't! Wish now I'd put arsenic in it." And then followed some language which I will not weary you by repeating. The Skipper was not the most profane man that I ever sailed with, but in those days of which I write—days long past, ah me!—that is saying a great deal more than any one to-day would imagine. Men, and particularly men who followed the sea, did not regard profanity as we do nowadays. Cynthia was used to the Skipper's ordinary looseness of speech, and, having heard it all her life, was astonished at very little that he said. I have learned to look upon such language with disgust, and I thank the refining influences of the day in which we live for making me see how much worse than silly it was, and, though I shall try to make the Skipper's speech sound more like the Skipper of modern times, still to make him seem at all the man that his friends knew him, I must occasionally point his marks as he himself pointed them.
Cynthia stood looking steadily at her Uncle as his adjectived indignation poured forth. When his vocabulary was exhausted, he sat down on the ground, weak from his exertion. Cynthia stood looking fixedly at him. Then, as the enormity of his offence overcame him, he drew out his bandana and mopped his face.
"Beg pardon, Cynthy, but you shouldn't have been here."