"That she loved Red Jason, and ought to have married him," said Jacob; "but threw him up after they had been sweethearting together, because he was poor, and then came to Iceland and married Michael Sunlocks because he was rich."
"Chut! Numskull again! He'd never believe you," said Thurstan.
"Would he not?" said Jacob, "then maybe he would believe his own eyes. Look there," and he drew a letter out of his pocket.
It was the abandoned letter that Greeba wrote to Jason.
"Isn't he a boy!" chuckled Gentleman John.
Two days longer they stayed at Reykjavik, and rambled idly about the town, much observed by the Icelanders and Danes for their monkey jackets of blue Manx cloth, and great sea boots up to their thighs. Early on the afternoon of the second day they sighted, from the new embankment where they stood and watched the masons, a ship coming up the fiord from the Smoky Point. It was a brig, with square sails set, and as she neared the port she ran up a flag to the masthead. The flag was the Icelandic flag, the banner of the Vikings, the white falcon on the blue ground, and the Fairbrothers noticed that at the next moment it was answered by a like flag on the flag-staff of Government House.
"He's coming, he's yonder," said Jacob, flapping his hands under his armpits to warm them.
In a few minutes they saw that there was a flutter over the smooth surface of the life of the town, and that small groups of people were trooping down to the jetty. Half an hour later the brig ran into harbor, dropped anchor below the lava reef, and sent its small boat ashore. Three men sat in the boat; the two sailors who rowed, and a gentleman who sat on the seat between them. The gentleman was young, flaxen-haired, tall, slight, with a strong yet winsome face, and clad in a squirrel-skin coat and close-fitting squirrel-skin cap. When the boat grounded by the jetty he leapt ashore with a light spring, smiled and nodded to the many who touched their hats to him, hailed others with a hearty word, and then swung into the saddle of a horse that stood waiting for him, and rode away at an eager trot in the direction of Government House.
It was Michael Sunlocks.