XXIV
JOHN CATHER’S FATE
’Twas with a start that I realized the lateness of the hour. Time for liquor! ’Twas hard to believe. My uncle sat with his bottle and glass and little brown jug. The glass was empty and innocent of dregs; the stopper was still tight in the bottle, the jug brimming with clear water from our spring. He had himself fetched them from the pantry, it seemed, and was now awaiting, with genial patience, the arrival of company to give an air of conviviality to the evening’s indulgence. I caught him in a smiling muse, his eye on the tip of his wooden leg; he was sailed, it seemed, to a clime of feeling far off from the stress out of which I had come. There was no question: I was not interrogated upon the lapse of the crew, as he called John Cather and Judy and me, from the politeness of attendance at dinner, which, indeed, he seemed to have forgotten in a train of agreeable recollections. He was in a humor as serene and cheerfully voluble as ever I met with in my life; and when he had bade me join him at the table to pour his first dram, he fell to on the narrative of some adventure, humorously occurring, off the 291 Funks, long, long ago, in the days of his boyhood. I did not attend, nor did I pour the dram: being for the time deeply occupied with reflections upon the square, black bottle on the table before me––the cure of moods my uncle had ever maintained it would work.
I got up resolved.
“Where you goin’, Dannie?” says my uncle, his voice all at once vacant of cheerfulness.
“To the pantry, sir,” I answered.
“Ah!” says he. “Is it ginger-ale, Dannie?”
“No, sir.”