Bent with apparent age, halting in his steps, clad in rags so far beyond repair that they scarcely covered him respectably, even in that half-clothed community, came a white man.
His face was covered with a rank, bushy beard. His figure, when he came close, was seen to be not only bronzed and roughened as to skin by exposure, but was, as well, in a pitiful condition with the ravages of drink. His eyes were more bleary and unpleasant than had been those of Henry Morgan. His voice, high and shaky, whined and implored.
“A beach comber,” Bill told them. “That’s what a white man comes to when he gets stranded in one of these dead spots, if he lets himself go.”
“It’s a pity,” Tom said. “He looks as if he has lost his own self-respect, for he isn’t even clean; and he has no will power, I’ll bet, or he wouldn’t have stayed here.”
“Laziness, drink—they tell the story,” Bill responded. “They’d sap the vitality of one of the old Greek Gods!”
The pitiable figure sidled up, whining, a shaky hand extended in supplication.
“I don’t suppose you’d give me a drink!” he whined.
Bill shook his head.
“No,” replied the bent figure, which looked seventy but which might have seen no more than fifty years of life—but such a life! “No, nobody ever does. Nor—a smoke—not even a little ’baccy for me pipe.”
Bill drew out a sack of tobacco and some thin papers and shook a little tobacco into one of the latter. He saw it spilled from the shaking fingers that tried to roll the paper, and made a cigarette.