“Sure now,” observed Jerry MacGowl, looking earnestly at the letter, “it do seem to me, for all the world, as if a cat had drawed his tail across it after stumblin’ over a ink-bottle.”
“Don’t Mrs Moy live in Ramsgate?” inquired Jim Welton.
“Of course she do,” replied Dick.
“But I’m not going there; I’m goin’ to Yarmouth,” said Jim.
“Wot then?” retorted Dick, “d’ee suppose the clerk o’ the post-office at Yarmouth ain’t as well able to read as the one at Ramsgate, even though the writin’ do be done with a cat’s tail? Go along with ’ee.”
Thus dismissed, Jim descended the side and was quickly on board the sloop Nora to which he belonged.
On the deck of the little craft he was received gruffly by a man of powerful frame and stern aspect, but whose massive head, covered with shaggy grey curling hair, seemed to indicate superior powers of intellect. This was Morley Jones, the master and owner of the sloop.
“A pretty mess you’ve made of it; I might have been in Yarmouth by this time,” he said, testily.
“More likely at the bottom of the sea,” answered Jim, quietly, as he went aft and looked at the compass—more from habit than from any desire to receive information from that instrument.
“Well, if I had been at the bottom o’ the sea, what then? Who’s to say that I mayn’t risk my life if I see fit? It’s not worth much,” he said, gloomily.