"You gave him a piece of your mind, didn't you?" he asked, with a wink of his "starboard eye."
"I believe I did," I answered.
"I allus said you would. 'Wait till himself is after coming home, and it'll be the devil sit up for some of them,' says I."
There was only one limitation to Tommy's satisfaction over our day's expedition—that he had not cracked the powdered skulls of "some o' them riddiclus dunkeys."
[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]
ONE HUNDRED AND NINTH CHAPTER
Another month passed, and then began the last and most important phase of my too changeful story.
Every week Martin had been coming and going between Ellan and London, occupied when he was away with the business of his next Expedition (for which Parliament had voted a large sum), and when he was at home with reports, diaries, charts, maps, and photographs toward a book he was writing about his last one.
As for myself, I had been (or tried to think I had been) entirely happy. With fresh air, new milk, a sweet bedroom, and above all, good and tender nursing (God bless Christian Ann for all she did for me!), my health had improved every day—or perhaps, by that heavenly hopefulness which goes with certain maladies, it had seemed to me to do so.