“He’s up, eating his breakfast,”, he answered. “I’ve locked your door, and the garden gate too, and here’s the keys,” he added, pointing to them by the side of his plate.
“Poor forsaken critter!” murmured Hannah compassionately. “It just made my heart ache to see him when I went up there yesterday. He looked so awful lean and sick.”
“He looks a great deal better this mornin’,” remarked the Captain. “The sleep’s done him a heap of good. It’s astonishin’ how much those colored folks can bear. You wunt know that chap in about a week, he’ll have fatted up so. I’ve dressed him out, John, in some of my old clothes, and made him look quite decent.”
“That’s right, Eldad,” said Harrington. “I’ll make it up to you.”
The Captain laid down his knife, and with his head all askew, looked at Harrington.
“You’ll make it up to me, John?” he remarked, blandly, with a great disposition to swear. “By the spoon of horn, I’d like to catch you at it! The best suit of clothes I’ve got in the house wouldn’t be too good for a man that’s gone through what he has—leastways, if they was fit for him, which they ain’t; and I’m not goin’ to be paid for my Christian duty, young man.”
“I ask your pardon, Eldad,” returned Harrington. “I spoke hastily, and didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“Of course you didn’t,” grumbled the Captain, mollified. “It’s only just your plaguy openhandedness that wunt let nobody go to expense but yourself.”
“By the way, Eldad,” hurriedly replied the young man, steering off the conversation from the approaching commendations, “I’m going to take him off to-night. He’ll be safer there.”
“All right. So he will,” rejoined the Captain, curtly. “That is, if he’s safe anywhere in Massachusetts now. It’s ebb-tide with us this year with a vengeance. If the people haven’t had enough of conservative legislation to sicken ’em this term of the General Court, they never will have. The doin’s of the Legislature have been shameful. Half a dozen righteous measures that passed the Senate, those black sheep in the House have defeated.