As I ran the boat into his cove, I could hear his dog bark warningly.
The door of his barn,—for it was nothing else,—was closed, and it was some time before I heard Meaghan's deep voice in answer to my knock, inviting me to come in and bidding his dog to lie down.
Meaghan was sitting, presumably reading a newspaper, which was the only kind of "literature" I ever saw him read. His attitude appeared to me to be assumed and I had a notion that, when the dog first barked at my approach, he had been busy with the contents of a brass-bound, wooden chest which now lay half under his bunk, in a recess in the far corner.
"Hello! Thought you might come over. Sit down," he greeted. "Saw the boss pull out half an hour ago. I'm just sittin' down for my turn at the newspaper. They leave me a bundle off the steamer once in a while. This one's from the old country;—the Liverpool Monitor. It's two months old, but what's the dif,—the news is just as good as if it was yesterday's or to-morrow's."
I looked round Jake's shanty. Considering it was a single-roomed place and used for cooking, washing, sleeping and everything else, it was wonderfully tidy, although, to say truth, there was little in it after all to occasion untidiness: a stove, a pot, a frying-pan, an enamelled tin teapot, some crockery, a table, an oil lamp, three chairs, the brass-bound trunk, two wheat-flake boxes and Jake's bed,—with one other addition,—a fifteen-gallon keg with a stopcock in it and set on a wooden stand close to his bunk.
An odour of shell-fish pervaded the atmosphere, coming from some kind of soup made from clams and milk, on which Jake had evidently been dining. The residue of it still sat in a pot on the stove. This, I discovered, was Jake's favourite dish.
He rose, took two breakfast cups from a shelf and went over to the keg in the corner. He filled up both of them to the brim.
"Have a drink, George?" he invited, offering me one of the cups.
"What is it?" I asked, thinking it might be a cider of some kind.
"What d'ye suppose, man?—ginger beer? It's good rye whiskey."