“You’ve come to live with us?” asked Dolly Young, looking up in his face with an innocent smile, and taking his rough hand.
“To tell us stories?” said little Arthur Quintal, with an equally innocent smile.
“Well, no, my dears, not exactly,” answered the seaman, looking in a dazed manner at the pretty faces and graceful forms around him; “but if I only had the chance to remain here, it’s my belief that I would.”
Further remark was stopped by the appearance of John Adams coming towards the group. He walked slowly, and kept his eyes steadily, yet wistfully, fastened on the seaman. Holding out his hand, he said in a low tone, as if he were soliloquising, “At last! It’s like a dream!” Then, as the sailor grasped his hand and shook it warmly, he added aloud a hearty “Welcome, welcome to Pitcairn.”
“Thank ’ee, thank ’ee,” said Jack Brace, not less heartily; “an’ may I ax if you are one o’ the Bounty mutineers, an’ no mistake?”
“The old tone,” murmured Adams, “and the old lingo, an’ the old cut o’ the jib, an’—an’—the old toggery.”
He took hold of a flap of Jack’s pea-jacket, and almost fondled it.
“Oh, man, but it does my heart good to see you! Come, come away up to my house an’ have some grub. Yes, yes—axin’ your pardon for not answerin’ right off—I am one o’ the Bounty mutineers; the last one—John Smith once, better known now as John Adams. But where do you hail from, friend?”
Jack at once gave him the desired information, told him on the way up all he knew about the fate of the mutineers who had remained at Otaheite, and received in exchange a brief outline of the history of the nine mutineers who had landed on Pitcairn.
The excitement of the two men and their interest in each other increased every moment; the one being full of the idea of having made a wonderful discovery of, as it were, a lost community, the other being equally full of the delight of once more talking to a man—a seaman—a messmate, he might soon say, for he meant to feed him like a prince.