"Here's an ornament you dropped during that ground-and-lofty tumbling, you old tinhorn," said he. "What did you wear it for, anyhow?"
"Blow me tight!" exclaimed Bunce, staring at the patch with falling jaw. "Ain't that reedic'lous?" he added, with a feeble attempt to treat the matter lightly.
"It is rather ridiculous, Bunce, and that's a fact," answered Matt. "You've a pair of very good eyes, it seems to me, and what's the good of that patch?"
The mariner grabbed the bit of green cloth and pulled the string over his head.
"I never said I'd lost one o' my lamps," he averred, settling the patch in place. "Off Table Mountain, South Africy, a cable parted on the ole Hottentot, an' I was hit in the eye with a loose rope's end. For a while, I thought I was goin' blind. But I didn't, only the eye has been weak ever sence, an' needs purtection. That's why I wear the patch."
"You've got it over the wrong eye, Bunce," observed McGlory. "You've been wearing it over the left eye, and now it's over the right. Have you got any clear notion which eye was hit with that rope's end?"
Bunce hastily changed the position of the patch.
"I'm that rattled," said he, "that I'm all ahoo, an' don't rightly know what I'm about. I——"
For an instant he stared up the track, breaking off his words abruptly; then, without any further explanation, he whirled and rushed for the timber.
With a yell of anger, McGlory started after him.