“I say, mates,” remarked Dick Moy, pausing in his work, and wiping his brow, “are ’ee aweer that the cap’n has ordered us to be ready to start wi’ the first o’ the tide at half after five to-morrow?”
“I knows it,” replied Jack Shales, laying down the black brush and taking up the white one.
“I knows it too,” said Jerry MacGowl, “but it don’t make no manner of odds to me, ’cause I means to stop ashore and enjoy meself. I mean to amoose meself with the trial o’ that black thief Morley Jones.”
Dick Moy resumed his work with a grunt, and said that Jerry was a lucky fellow to be so long on sick-leave, and Jack said he wished he had been called up as a witness in Jones’s case, for he would have cut a better figure than Jim Welton did.
“Ay, boy,” said Dick Moy, “but there wos a reason for that. You know the poor feller is in love wi’ Jones’s daughter, an’ he didn’t like for to help to convict his own father-in-law to be, d’ye see? That’s where it is. The boy Billy Towler was a’most as bad. He’s got a weakness for the gal too, an’ no wonder, for she’s bin as good as a mother to ’im. They say that Billy nigh broke the hearts o’ the lawyers, he wos so stoopid at sometimes, an’ so oncommon cute at others. But it warn’t o’ no use. Jim’s father was strong in his evidence agin him, an’ that Mr Larks, as comed aboard of the Gull, you remember, he had been watching an’ ferreting about the matter to that extent that he turned Jones’s former life inside out. It seems he’s bin up to dodges o’ that kind for a long time past.”
“No! has he?” said Jack Shales.
“Arrah, didn’t ye read of it?” exclaimed Jerry MacGowl.
“No,” replied Jack drily; “not bein’ on the sick-list I han’t got time to read the papers, d’ye see?”
“Well,” resumed Dick Moy, “it seems he has more than once set fire to his premises in Gravesend, and got the insurance money. Hows’ever, he has got fourteen years’ transportation now, an’ that’ll take the shine pretty well out of him before he comes back.”
“How did the poor gal take it?” asked Jack.