“Yes,” I answered, “good night.” And I went forth.
CHAPTER XXVI.
I met the two sailors at “Old Ben’s” tavern. They had been waiting, taking a nip or two at a table until I came.
“’Tis good liquor,” said Garnett, as he put down his glass; “’tis a most holy an’ pious drink, makin’ all manner of holy an’ pious thoughts come into my old head. ’Tis good liquor an’ well fitted for a man along in years, like myself, who has filled his skin with all manner of truck and ruined his digestion. You say you’ll have another?”
The glasses were refilled.
“Now, ’pon me whurd, fer a fact, Mr. Gore, ’tis fer gettin’ outrajis drunk that baldheaded infidel is after; jist obsarve him.”
Garnett had removed his cap and was hard at work mopping the dent in the top of his shining, bald cranium, where he had been “stove down” by a handspike in the hands of a sailor on one of his early voyages. Then he pulled out his little nickel-plated vial and sniffed at it violently.
“I don’t mind his personalities,” he remarked, “for I call to mind the time well enough when I could make him or any of his kin toe a seam. We had a little fracas onct, when I was mate with old man Anderson, and he remembers well enough what I used to be when it came to finding out who was who on a vessel’s main-deck.”
“What Anderson was that?” I asked. “You mean the one who used to be in with Mr. Ropesend?”
“Sure, no other, though I supposed he was dead long afore this. He was an out an’ outer when he was on deep water, an’ a little more so when he was on the beach. I misremember something about a shindy he got into on the West Coast, when he was skipper of the Ivanhoe. He did the right thing, though, for he took the boy along with him as soon as he growed big enough an’ carried him around the Cape. Afterward he made a present of him to old man Brown’s wife, who had no young uns of her own, an’ who was always making pets of dogs and parrots aboard and driving the old man half crazy. Old man Brown and your father, old man Gore, were great chums, and so he was with old Mr. Ropesend—”