“Oh! I see. Out huntin’, I suppose. After deer—eh?”
“Well, now, that was a pretty fair guess, Charlie,” said Dick, laughing. “To tell ye the plain truth, I have been out arter a dear—full sail—an’—”
“And you bagged it, of course. Fairly run it down, I suppose,” said his friend, again interrupting.
“Well, there ain’t no ‘of course’ about it, but as it happened, I did manage to overhaul her, and coming to close quarters, I—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” interrupted Charlie a third time, with provoking coolness. “You ran her on to the rocks, Dick—which was unseamanlike in the extreme—at least you ran the dear aground on a fallen tree and, sitting down beside it, asked it to become Mrs Darvall, and the amiable creature agreed, eh?”
“Why, how on earth did ’ee come for to know that?” asked Dick, in blazing astonishment.
“Well, you know, there’s no great mystery about it. If a bold sailor will go huntin’ close to the house, and run down his game right in front of Mr Shank’s windows, he must expect to have witnesses. However, give me your flipper, mess-mate, and let me congratulate you, for in my opinion there’s not such another dear on all the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. But now that I’ve found you, I want to lay some of my future plans before you.”
They had not been discussing these plans many minutes, when Mary was seen crossing the yard in company with Hunky Ben.
“If Hunky would only stop, we’d keep quite jolly till you return,” observed Dick, in an undertone as the two approached.
“We were just talking of you, Ben,” observed Charlie, as they came up.