“Well, lad, fire away.”
“Yes, but I want you to come with me,” said the boy, with an anxious and rather mysterious look.
“Very good!—heave ahead,” said the boatswain, getting up, and following Corrie with a peculiarly nautical roll.
After he had been led through the settlement and a considerable way up the mountain in silence, the boatswain suddenly stopped, and said—“Hallo! hold on; my timbers won’t stand much more o’ this sort o’ thing. I was built for navigatin’ the seas,—I was not for cruisin’ on the land. We’re far enough out of ear-shot, I s’pose, in this here bit of a plantation. Come, what have ye got to say to me? You ain’t a-goin’ to tell me the Freemasons’ word, are ye? For, if so, don’t trouble yourself, I wouldn’t listen to it on no account w’atever. It’s too mysterious that is for me.”
“Dick Price,” said Corrie, looking up in the face of the seaman, with a serious expression that was not often seen on his round countenance, “you’re a man.”
The boatswain looked down at the youthful visage in some surprise.
“Well, I s’pose I am,” said he, stroking his beard complacently.
“And you know what it is to be misunderstood, misjudged, don’t you?”
“Well, now I come to think on it, I believe I have had that misfortune—specially w’en I’ve ordered the powder-monkies to make less noise, for them younkers never do seem to understand me. As for misjudgin’, I’ve often an’ over again heard ’em say I was the crossest feller they ever did meet with, but they never was more out in their reckoning.”
Corrie did not smile; he did not betray the smallest symptom of power either to appreciate or to indulge in jocularity at that moment. But feeling that it was useless to appeal to the former experience of the boatswain, he changed his plan of attack.