“Dannie,” he asked, in quick alarm, a fear so sudden and unexpected that I was persuaded of the propriety of my premonition, “what you thinkin’ about? Eh, Dannie?” he cried. “What you lookin’ that way for?”
I would not tell him that I knew the skipper of the Quick as Wink, whose butt the fool must be.
“You isn’t ’lowin’,” Moses began, “that mother––”
“Not at all, Moses!” says I.
’Twas instant and complete relief he got from this denial. “We sails,” says he, with all a traveller’s importance, 227 “at dawn o’ to-morrow. I’ll be gone from Twist Tickle by break o’ day. I’ll be gone t’ new places––t’ harbors I’ve heared tell of but never seed with my own eyes. I’m not quite knowin’,” says he, doubtfully, “how I’ll get along with the cookin’. Mother always ’lowed,” he continued, with a greater measure of hope, “that I was more’n fair on cookin’ a cup o’ tea. ‘Moses,’ says she, ‘you can brew a cup o’ tea so well as any fool I ever knowed.’ But that was on’y mother,” he added, in modest self-deprecation. “Jus’ mother.”
I wished again that the fool had not fallen into the mercilessly facetious company of Skipper Saucy Bill North of the schooner Quick as Wink.
“An’, Dannie,” says Moses, “I’m scared I’ll fail with all but the tea.”
’Twas come near the evening of that mellow Sunday. On the Whisper Cove road and the greening hills of Twin Islands, where Moses and I had walked in simple companionship, the birds had been mating and nesting in the thick sunshine of the afternoon. Chirp and flutter and shrill song! ’Twas a time for the mating of birds. The haste and noise and pomposity of this busy love-making! The loud triumph and soft complaint of it! All the world of spruce and alder and sunlit spaces had been a-flutter. But the weather was now fallen gloomy, the sky overcast, the wind blowing in from the black, uneasy sea, where floes and gigantic bergs of ice drifted, like frozen ghosts, cold and dead and aimlessly driven; and the hopeful sunshine had left the hills, and the piping and chirping were stilled, and I heard no 228 more fluttering wings or tender love-songs. The fool of Twist Tickle paused in the road to stare vacantly northward. ’Twas there dark with menacing clouds––thick, sombre clouds, tinged with a warning blue, rising implacably above the roughening black of the sea. He wondered, it may be, in his dull, weakling way, concerning the coasts beyond the grave curtain, which he must discover––new coasts, dealing with us variously, as we disclose them to our hearts. I watched him with misgiving. To be sure, the skipper of the Quick as Wink was an unkind man, cynical and quick to seek selfish laughter, whatever the wound he dealt; but Tumm, our friend and the genial friend of all the world, thinks I, more hopefully, would not have the poor fool wronged.
“Dannie,” says Moses, turning, “I’m scared my cookin’ won’t quite fit the stomachs o’ the crew o’ the Quick as Wink.”
“Ay, Moses,” says I, to hearten him; “but never a good man was that didn’t fear a new task.”