“Poor fellows!” muttered Fox, who was a man of tender feelings, although apt to feel more for himself than for any one else.
“I think Dick Martin was in the boat,” said the mate of the Cormorant, who stood beside his skipper. “I saw them when they shoved off, and though it was a longish distance, I could make him out by his size, an’ the fur cap he wore.”
“Well, the world won’t lose much if he’s gone,” returned Fox; “he was a bad lot.”
It did not occur to the skipper at that time that he himself was nearly, if not quite, as bad a “lot.” But bad men are proverbially blind to their own faults.
“He was a cross-grained fellow,” returned the mate, “specially when in liquor, but I never heard no worse of ’im than that.”
“Didn’t you?” said Fox; “didn’t you hear what they said of ’im at Gorleston?—that he tried to do his sister out of a lot o’ money as was left her by some cove or other in furrin parts. An’ some folk are quite sure that it was him as stole the little savin’s o’ that poor widdy, Mrs Mooney, though they can’t just prove it agin him. Ah, he is a bad lot, an’ no mistake. But I may say that o’ the whole bilin’ o’ the Martins. Look at Fred, now.”
“Well, wot of him?” asked the mate, in a somewhat gruff tone.
“What of him!” repeated the skipper, “ain’t he a hypocrite, with his smooth tongue an’ his sly ways, as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, an’ now—where is he?”
“Well, where is he!” demanded the mate, with increasing gruffness.
“Why, in course nobody knows where he is,” retorted the skipper; “that’s where it is. No sooner does he get a small windfall—leastwise, his mother gets it—than he cuts the trawlers, an’ all his old friends without so much as sayin’ ‘Good-bye,’ an’ goes off to Lunnon or somewheres, to set up for a gentleman, I suppose.”