“The bid?”
“Ay; the bid.”
“Not expensive,” says he.
“But how much, Moses?”
“Well, Dannie,” he answered, with a sigh and a rub of his curly, yellow beard, “I ’lowed mother wouldn’t charge much for servin’ the Queen: for,” says he, enlivened, “’twould be too much like common labor t’ carry Her Majesty’s mail at a price. An’ I bid,” he added, eying me vaguely, “accordin’ t’ what I ’lowed mother would have me do in the Queen’s service. Fac’ is, Dannie,” says he, in a squall of confidence, “I ’lowed I’d carry it free!”
’Twas this contact with the world of Jimmie Tick’s Cove that embarked the fool upon an adventurous enterprise. When, in the spring of that year, the sea being open, the Quick as Wink made our harbor, the first of all the traders, Tumm, the clerk, was short-handed for a cook, having lost young Billy Rudd overboard, in a great sea, beating up in stress of weather to the impoverished settlement at Diamond Run. ’Twas Moses, the choice of necessity, he shipped in the berth of that merry, tow-headed lad of tender voice, whose songs, poor boy! would never again be lifted, o’ black nights in harbor, in the forecastle of the Quick as Wink. “Ay, Dannie,” says Moses, “you’d never think it, maybe, but I’m shipped along o’ Tumm for the French 226 shore an’ the Labrador ports. I’ve heared tell a wonderful lot about Mother Burke, but I’ve never seed the ol’ rock; an’ I’ve heared tell a wonderful lot about Coachman’s Cove an’ Conch an’ Lancy Loop an’ the harbors o’ the straits shores, but I’ve never seed un with my own eyes, an’ I’m sort o’ wantin’ t’ know how they shapes up alongside o’ Twist Tickle. I ’low,” says he, “you don’t find many harbors in the world like Twist Tickle. Since I been travellin’ t’ Jimmie Tick’s Cove with the mail,” he continued, with a stammer and flush, like a man misled from an austere path by the flesh-pots of earth, “I’ve cotched a sinful hankerin’ t’ see the world.”
I wished he had not.
“But mother,” he added, quickly, in self-defence, “always ’lowed a man ought t’ see the world. So,” says he, “I’m shipped along o’ Tumm, for better or for worse, an’ I’m bound down north in the Quick as Wink with the spring supplies.”
’Twas a far journey for that sensitive soul.