Taking this as a permission to enter, Brandon walked across the long saloon, littered with tables and chairs, and its door covered with sawdust, and opened the door.
The apartment beyond was as badly furnished as the outer room, there being only a square deal table and several wooden bottomed chairs. In one of these chairs before the table, with his head bowed upon his arms, was the sailor whom Brandon had seen two days before in the woods on his uncle’s farm back in Chopmist, the only occupant of the place.
CHAPTER XIII
THE OLD SAILOR WITH THE WOODEN LEG
It was only in the country—in the woods and sheltered fence corners—that the patches of snow still remained on this sixth day of April. In New York the sun shone warmly upon the sidewalks, washed clean by the shower of the night before, and the tiny patches of grass in the parks and squares were quite green again.
About the middle of the forenoon a man stumped along a street leading to what remains of the Battery park—a man dressed in a half uniform of navy blue, and with a face (where the beard did not hide the cuticle) as brown as a berry.
At first glance one would have pronounced this person to be a sailor, and have been correct in the surmise, too.
The man’s frame was of huge mold, with massive development of chest and limbs, and a head like a lion’s. But his bronzed cheeks were somewhat hollow, and his step halting, this latter not altogether owing to the fact that his right leg had been amputated at the knee and the deficiency supplied by an old fashioned wooden leg.
Still, despite his evident infirmity, the old seaman looked cheerfully out upon the world on this bright April morning, and pegged along the sidewalk and into the park with smiling good nature.
Not a beggar had accosted him during his walk down town without having a nickel tossed to him, and it was with vast contentment that the wooden legged sailor at length seated himself upon a bench, from which vantage point he could overlook the bay and its multitudinous shipping.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, sniffing the air which blew in from the sea, like a hungry dog. “This is life, this is! Thank heaven I’ve got away from them swabs of doctors at last. Another week at that ere hospital would ha’ been the death o’ me. Still, I reckon they meant well ’nough.”