’Twas all hands t’ the pumps for poor Tom Bull. “Dear man!” he gasped, his confusion quite accomplished.
“An’ paid for,” says my uncle.
Tom Bull looked up.
“’Tis all,” says my uncle, solemnly jerking thumb down towards the bowels of the earth, “paid for!”
Tom Bull gulped the dregs of his whiskey.
By-and-by, having had his glass––and still with the puzzle of myself to mystify his poor wits––Tom Bull departed. My uncle and I still kept to the stall, for there was an inch of spirits in my uncle’s glass, and always, though the night was late and stormy, a large possibility for new company. ’Twas grown exceeding noisy in a far corner of the place, where a foreign 20 captain, in from the north (Fogo, I take it), loaded with fish for Italian ports, was yielding to his liquor; and I was intent upon this proceeding, wondering whether or not they would soon take to quarrelling, as often happened in that tap-room, when Tom Bull softly came again, having gone but a step beyond the threshold of the place. He stepped, as though aimlessly, to our place, like a man watched, fearing the hand of the law; and for a time he sat musing, toying with the glass he had left.
“Skipper Nicholas,” says he, presently, “I ’low Dannie Callaway haves a friend t’ buy un all them jools?”
“This here little ol’ Dannie,” says my uncle, with another little reassuring tug at my ear, “haves no friend in all the world but me.”
’Twas true.