Kitabı oku: «The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes», sayfa 23
“If you undertake to come aboard of me,” called the pirate, “I’ll shoot into you. You’ve got no authority to board me, and I won’t have you do it. If you undertake it ‘twill be at your own risk, for I’ll neither ask quarter of you nor give none.”
“Very well,” said the lieutenant, “if you choose to try that, you may do as you please; for I’m coming aboard of you as sure as heaven.”
“Push off the bow there!” called the boatswain at the wheel. “Look alive! Why don’t you push off the bow!”
“She’s hard aground!” answered the gunner. “We can’t budge her an inch.”
“If they was to fire into us now,” said the sailing-master, “they’d smash us to pieces.”
“They won’t fire into us,” said the lieutenant. “They won’t dare to.” He jumped down from the cabin deck-house as he spoke, and went forward to urge the men in pushing off the boat. It was already beginning to move.
At that moment the sailing-master suddenly called out, “Mr. Maynard! Mr. Maynard! they’re going to give us a broadside!”
Almost before the words were out of his mouth, before Lieutenant Maynard could turn, there came a loud and deafening crash, and then instantly another, and a third, and almost as instantly a crackling and rending of broken wood. There were clean yellow splinters flying everywhere. A man fell violently against the lieutenant, nearly overturning him, but he caught at the stays and so saved himself. For one tense moment he stood holding his breath. Then all about him arose a sudden outcry of groans and shouts and oaths. The man who had fallen against him was lying face down upon the deck. His thighs were quivering, and a pool of blood was spreading and running out from under him. There were other men down, all about the deck. Some were rising; some were trying to rise; some only moved.
There was a distant sound of yelling and cheering and shouting. It was from the pirate sloop. The pirates were rushing about upon her decks. They had pulled the cannon back, and, through the grunting sound of the groans about him, the lieutenant could distinctly hear the thud and punch of the rammers, and he knew they were going to shoot again.
The low rail afforded almost no shelter against such a broadside, and there was nothing for it but to order all hands below for the time being.
“Get below!” roared out the lieutenant. “All hands get below and lie snug for further orders!” In obedience the men ran scrambling below into the hold, and in a little while the decks were nearly clear except for the three dead men and some three or four wounded. The boatswain crouching down close to the wheel, and the lieutenant himself, were the only others upon deck. Everywhere there were smears and sprinkles of blood. “Where’s Brookes?” the lieutenant called out.
“He’s hurt in the arm, sir, and he’s gone below,” said the boatswain.
Thereupon the lieutenant himself walked over to the forecastle hatch, and, hailing the gunner, ordered him to get up another ladder, so that the men could be run up on deck if the pirates should undertake to come aboard. At that moment the boatswain at the wheel called out that the villains were going to shoot again, and the lieutenant, turning, saw the gunner aboard of the pirate sloop in the act of touching the iron to the touch-hole. He stooped down. There was another loud and deafening crash of cannon, one, two, three – four, – the last two almost together, – and almost instantly the boatswain called out: “’Tis the sloop, sir! look at the sloop!”
The sloop had got afloat again, and had been coming up to the aid of the schooner, when the pirates fired their second broadside, now at her. When the lieutenant looked at her she was still quivering with the impact of the shot, and the next moment she began falling off to the wind, and he could see the wounded men rising and falling and struggling upon her decks.
At the same moment the boatswain called out that the enemy was coming aboard, and even as he spoke the pirate sloop came drifting out from the cloud of smoke that enveloped her, looming up larger and larger as she came down upon them. The lieutenant still crouched down under the rail, looking out at them. Suddenly, a little distance away, she came about, broadside on, and then drifted. She was close aboard now. Something came flying through the air – another and another. They were bottles. One of them broke with a crash upon the deck. The others rolled over to the further rail. In each of them a quick-match was smoking. Almost instantly, there was a flash and a terrific report, and the air was full of the whizz and singing of broken particles of glass and iron. There was another report, and then the whole air seemed full of gunpowder smoke. “They’re aboard of us!” shouted the boatswain, and even as he spoke, the lieutenant roared out: “All hands to repel boarders!” A second later there came the heavy, thumping bump of the vessels coming together.
Lieutenant Maynard, as he called out the order, ran forward through the smoke, snatching one of his pistols out of his pocket and the cutlass out of its sheath as he did so. Behind him, the men were coming, swarming up from below. There was a sudden stunning report of a pistol, and then another and another, almost together. There was a groan and the fall of a heavy body, and then a figure came jumping over the rail, with two or three more directly following. The lieutenant was in the midst of the gunpowder smoke, when suddenly Blackbeard was before him. The pirate captain had stripped himself naked to the waist. His shaggy black hair was falling over his eyes, and he looked like a demon fresh from the pit, with his frantic face. Almost with the blindness of instinct, the lieutenant thrust out his pistol, firing it as he did so. The pirate staggered back: He was down – no; he was up again. He had a pistol in each hand; but there was a stream of blood running down his naked ribs. Suddenly, the mouth of a pistol was pointing straight at the lieutenant’s head. He ducked instinctively, striking upward with his cutlass as he did so. There was a stunning, deafening report almost in his ear. He struck again blindly with his cutlass. He saw the flash of a sword and flung up his guard almost instinctively, meeting the crash of the descending blade. Somebody shot from behind him, and at the same moment he saw someone else strike the pirate. Blackbeard staggered again, and this time there was a great gash upon his neck. Then one of Maynard’s own men tumbled headlong upon him. He fell with the man, but almost instantly he had scrambled to his feet again, and as he did so he saw that the pirate sloop had drifted a little away from them, and that their grappling-iron had evidently parted. His hand was smarting as though struck with the lash of a whip. He looked around him; the pirate captain was nowhere to be seen – yes, there he was, lying by the rail. He raised himself upon his elbow, and the lieutenant saw that he was trying to point a pistol at him, with an arm that wavered and swayed blindly, the pistol nearly falling from his fingers. Suddenly, his other elbow gave way, and he fell down upon his face. He tried to raise himself – he fell down again. There was a report and a cloud of smoke, and when it cleared away Blackbeard had staggered up again. He was a terrible figure – his head nodding down upon his breast. Somebody shot again, and then the swaying figure toppled and fell. It lay still for a moment – then rolled over – then lay still again.
There was a loud splash of men jumping overboard, and then, almost instantly, the cry of “Quarter! quarter!” The lieutenant ran to the edge of the vessel. It was as he had thought: the grappling-irons of the pirate sloop had parted, and it had drifted away. The few pirates who had been left aboard of the schooner had jumped overboard and were now holding up their hands. “Quarter!” they cried. “Don’t shoot! – quarter!” And the fight was over.
The lieutenant looked down at his hand, and then he saw, for the first time, that there was a great cutlass gash across the back of it, and that his arm and shirt-sleeve were wet with blood. He went aft, holding the wrist of his wounded hand. The boatswain was still at the wheel. “By zounds!” said the lieutenant, with a nervous, quavering laugh, “I didn’t know there was such fight in the villains.”
His wounded and shattered sloop was again coming up toward him under sail, but the pirates had surrendered, and the fight was over.
CHAPTER XLVII
IN THE NEW LIFE
IT is wonderful how adolescent youth accepts the changes of its life, and with what fluency it adapts itself to them.
During the month that the Attorney Burton lingered at Marlborough before his return to England, it came to be more like home to Jack than any place in which he had ever lived. In a wonderfully little while there grew to be a singularly ripe feeling of familiarity about the roomy halls and passageways, the books, the pictures, the fine, stiff, solid furniture, the atmosphere of wide and affluent ease; a like familiarity in all the outside surroundings of unkempt grassy lawn, of garden and of stable. No doubt the steady, uniform kindness of those dear people tended more than anything else to endear everything to him, with that peculiar home-feeling that always afterward embalmed the memories of Marlborough in his mind. No one, not even his uncle, Sir Henry, in the few years that followed, seemed to fill the singular place in his heart occupied by Colonel Parker with his somewhat grandiose benignity; no one the place of Madam Parker with her fussy, sometimes tiresome, attentions.
It was a long time before Nelly Parker recovered her perfect strength. Some days she would appear almost perfectly herself; then would ensue times of petulant lassitude that were sometimes very hard to bear. The little doctor came every day to see her, sometimes staying to supper, and riding home alone through the starlit night. He and Jack struck up a great friendship, and there were many little meaningless fragments of that pleasant time remaining in Jack’s memory, in which the little pot-bellied man was the dominant figure.
One such recollection was of finding him waiting for Miss Nelly Parker when she and Jack returned from a ride to Bolingwood – Mr. Bamfield Oliver’s place. She had gone to call on the young ladies, and Jack, at her bidding, had reluctantly accompanied her. He always felt his awkwardness and young clumsiness at such times – the constraint of talking about himself and of answering those reiterated questions about his adventures. At the sound of their horses’ hoofs the doctor and Madam Parker had appeared at the door, and as Jack dismounted and helped Nelly Parker down from her horse at the horse-block, the doctor had called out, “Well, my young pirate, and so you are back again, then? Zooks! We were just debating whether you hadn’t run away with our young lady again, and for good and all this time.”
Another such recollection of his presence was of his coming unexpectedly one time while there was company out on the lawn, and of feeling her pulse as she sat in the midst of them all.
Such foolish little memory fragments are very apt to have some indefinable filaments of association that cause them to cling with peculiar tenacity to the memory.
For some such subtle reason all the little circumstances of a certain uneventful Sunday morning became very intimately a part of Jack’s life. That day he rode to the parish church with the family, in the great coach. It had been raining the day before, but then the air was full of warm, mellow autumn sunlight, that fell widely in through the coach windows and across Colonel Parker’s knees and his own lap, feeling warm and pleasant to his legs. The road was heavy with sticky mud, and the four horses strained and labored as they pulled the huge, yawing coach through the deeper ruts. Nelly Parker and her mother sat opposite, the young girl, all unconscious of his steady look, playing with and smoothing out the ribbons that hung from her prayer-book – trivial little things, but for some reason knit so closely into his consciousness, that his memory always recurred to them with a singular precision of detail. The church was paved with brick, and he even remembered how very chill and damp it was that morning, and how, by and by, when he moved his toes in his shoes, he found them grown numb and as cold as ice.
When the sermon was over the ladies and gentlemen gathered for a while, standing in groups here and there in the churchyard, flooded with the yellow sunlight that felt very bland and warm after the chill, damp interior of the building. The greater part of the ladies were gathered in a single group, chatting together about this or that of gossip. Three or four gentlemen stood with them, now and then putting in a word, now and then laughing. Colonel Parker and Mr. Bamfield Oliver and Mr. Cartwright were standing together, discussing tobacco; and from where he stood he could hear Mr. Oliver’s monologue running somewhat thus: – “I cannot understand it,” – here he offered the other gentlemen snuff from a fine silver-gilt snuff-box, – “I cannot understand it; ‘twas as good tobacco as any I ever shipped, and if there was anything the matter with it, as Sweet complains, why, the hogsheads must have been broached in the carrying. I’m sure it could not have been Jarkins’s fault; for he is the best packer I have.” And so on and so on.
All this while Jack was lingering near Nelly Parker, holding her prayer-book in his hand. He saw that Harry Oliver and two of his sisters were talking to Mrs. Cartwright a little distance away. He knew one of the young ladies; the other, who had been away from home for some time, was, as yet, a stranger to him. He felt that she was looking intently at him, and presently saw her whispering to her brother. He tried to appear unconscious, but with certain prescience he knew very well she was speaking to her brother about him and his adventures. Suddenly Harry Oliver burst out laughing. “Why, Master Jack,” he called, “here’s another young lady hath lost her heart to you, and thinks you’re a hero. The fame of your pirate adventures has reached all the way to the Bermuda Hundreds, ‘twould seem.”
The young lady’s velvety cheek, dark like her brother’s, colored to a soft crimson, and she turned sharply away. Jack felt himself blushing in sympathy, and Nelly Parker, looking at him, burst out with a peal of laughing.
The afternoon of another Sunday, when the news of the fight at Ocracock and the death of Blackbeard was first received at Marlborough, had perhaps more reason for its insistence upon the plane of his consciousness than this meaningless fragment.
Nelly Parker had gone to her room after dinner, and the house seemed singularly empty without her presence in it. Jack was sitting in the library, reading. Now and then the words formed themselves into ideas, but for long lapses he would read without knowing what he was reading, his mind full of and brimming over with the thought of her. The sunlight came in through the wide, open windows, and lay in great squares across the floor, and the brass of the nails in the chair and sofa and of the andirons, catching the light, gleamed like stars, and the room was full of the clear brightness. The blazing fire snapped and crackled in the great fireplace, and there was a dish of apples on the table.
While he so sat there he heard the door suddenly opened, and the rustle of a dress. He knew instantly and vividly who it was had come in – he felt it in every fiber, but he would not look up. Then he heard her moving about the room.
“What are you reading?” she said, at last.
Jack looked at the top of the page. “’Tis The Masque of Comus,” he said.
“The Masque of Comus!” she repeated. “I was reading that to papa yesterday.”
She came over and stood behind his chair as she spoke, leaning over him and looking down at the book in his hand, reading it as he read it. He felt her nearness, and every filament of nerve tingled at it. Her breath fanned his cheek, and a part of her dress touched his shoulder. His heart thrilled poignantly, and his breath came thickly and suffocatingly, but still he did not look up. She stood there close behind him for a long while. He could almost hear the beat of her young heart, and it seemed to him that she must be feeling some soft echo of his own passion. Suddenly she gave his elbow a push that knocked the book out of his hand, and then she burst out laughing. As Jack stooped to pick up the book there was the voice of some one in the hall without. It was Harry Oliver, and she sprang away from where she stood, and flew like a flash to a chair at some distance, where she seated herself, instantly demure.
Then Harry Oliver came into the room; and presently he and she were talking and laughing together, and all that agonizing delight of the little while before melted out of Jack’s heart and dissolved away and was gone.
That passionate, innocent joy of early love! How does it fill all these little nameless, foolish things full to overflowing with its tremulous golden happiness – its ardent pangs of deep delight!
It was a little while after this that Colonel Parker called Jack into his own cabinet and put a packet of papers in his hand, saying that they had just been sent up from Jamestown, and that they were from Lieutenant Maynard; that there had been a fight with the pirates at Ocracock, and that Blackbeard was killed.
“What!” exclaimed Jack. “Blackbeard dead?” And then again, after a moment – “Blackbeard dead!” It seemed incredible to him that such a thing could be; he could not realize it.
There was a list of killed and wounded accompanying the letter, and Jack read it over, name by name – he knew nearly all. “Why,” he cried, “Morton’s dead, too – and Miller, the quartermaster – and Roberts, and Gibbons. Why, that is all of Blackbeard’s officers, except Hands, who is lame at Bath Town.”
“Maynard says there was a lame man they arrested down at Bath Town and brought up with them.”
“That, then, must be Hands,” said Jack. “He was the fellow whom Blackbeard shot in sport while I was down there.” And then, suddenly thinking of Nelly Parker, his heart thrilled agonizingly again.
CHAPTER XLVIII
JACK MEETS SOME OLD FRIENDS
IT was late in November when Mr. Burton returned to England. Jack accompanied him as far as Jamestown; and Mr. Simms, who had business at the factory at Yorktown, also went down in the schooner as far as that place.
The day was keen and clear, with a soft, cool wind blowing, before which the schooner sloped swiftly away, dropping the great brick front of Marlborough rapidly behind. The wide rush of air and water seemed very full of life and vigor, and Jack lay up under the weather-rail in the warm sunlight, wrapped in his overcoat and given up utterly to the building of day-dreams.
He had just parted from Nelly Parker, and his mind was very full of thoughts of her. She had been more than usually teasing that morning. “I believe you wouldn’t mind if I were going away from you forever,” Jack had burst out as they stood lingering in the wide sunlight in front of the great house. “I sometimes think that you have no heart in you at all.”
Then she looked at him with sudden seriousness. “Do you, then, really think that of me?” she said. “Well, then, I may tell you that I have a heart, and that it would, indeed, grieve me to the heart if you were going away forever.”
“Would it?” Jack had said.
“Yes. And see – if I have teased you too much, here is my hand.”
Jack took her soft, white hand in his; it was very warm. Then with a sudden impulse he lifted it to his lips and pressed a long, long kiss upon it. She did not withdraw it, and when he looked up he saw that she was still gazing very steadily at him. His heart was beating with exceeding quickness, but he looked as steadily back at her, though with swimming sight. Then she had burst out into a peal of laughter, had snatched her hand away, and had run away back into the house, leaving him standing where he was. Then he had hurried down toward the wharf, hardly sensing whither he was walking, and not answering Mr. Simms when the factor asked him what had kept him so long.
Long after they had dropped Marlborough away behind, he still lay in the sunlight under the rail, wrapped closely in his overcoat, his heart full of the thought of her. He was giving himself over luxuriously to that foolish day-dreaming to which adolescent youth loves to yield itself, and upon the funny inconsequence of which the matured man looks back and laughs from the firmer stand of later years. For one often remembers such dear, foolish day-dreams in after times.
He imagined to himself how he would have to go away to live in England. He would not come back again, he thought, until he had made himself famous; then he would return to her once more. Yes; while he was away from her he would become very famous. Maybe he would enter the navy. There would be a great war, and his ship would be in battle. He pictured to himself a terrible battle in which the senior officers would all be killed, so that it would depend upon him, the youngest of all, to save the ship. He would call upon the men to follow him, and then, in a last desperate, almost hopeless attack, he would rush aboard the enemy’s ship, his men close behind him. They would conquer, but he would have been shot through the arm, and his arm would have to be cut off, and he would go with an empty sleeve – it seemed very pathetic as he thought of it. All the world would talk of the young hero who had saved the ship, and Nelly Parker would hear of it and would think, “He will now never come back to Virginia again. He is too great and too famous to remember me now.” Then one day he would suddenly appear before her. She would say: “What! have you, then, come back to us? Have you, then, not forgotten us?” He would smile and would say: “No, I can never forget you.” He would stand before her with one empty sleeve pinned to his breast. There would be an order upon his breast, and he would say: “I love you and have always loved you, and none but you.”
“If we make it in time,” said Mr. Simms, suddenly, speaking to the Attorney Burton where they stood together looking out toward the shore, “we’ll stop at the Roost this afternoon. There was a letter for Mr. Parker sent up to Marlborough by mistake yesterday, and I may as well leave it on the way down.”
His words broke sharply upon Jack’s thoughts and shattered the dream to fragments. He lay silent for a moment or two. “Do you think,” he said, suddenly, “that Mr. Parker is there now?”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Simms, turning toward him, “but I hope he is, so that I can leave this letter for him. Why do you ask?”
“I’d like to go ashore,” said Jack, “but I don’t care to meet him.”
“Why not?” said Mr. Simms. “He can’t do you any harm.”
“I know that very well,” said Jack, “but, all the same, I don’t want to see him, if I can help it.”
It wanted still an hour of sunset when they reached the Roost. Mr. Parker was not at home, and Jack accompanied Mr. Simms up to the house. How familiar and yet how strange everything appeared! How full of countless associations! There was a bed-coverlet hanging from a window, and he seemed to recognize its garish colors. A face passed by the open window – it was Peggy Pitcher. Two or three negroes came out from behind the end of the house and stood looking toward him; among them was Little Coffee. The negro boy stood staring; then, when Mr. Simms had gone into the house, he came forward, and Jack burst out laughing at his staring face. He asked the negro boy where Dennis was; Little Coffee said that the overseer was at the stable, and Jack went directly over to the outbuildings, Little Coffee following him. That feeling of renewed familiarity still surrounded everything. Everywhere the negroes grinned recognition at him, and he spoke to them all, laughing and nodding his head.
He found Dennis sitting in the shed by the stables mending an old saddle. He looked up when Jack came in, as though for a moment puzzled. Then instantly his face cleared. “Why, lad,” he said, “is that you?” He slipped the wax-end betwixt his lips and held out his hand. Then he looked Jack over. “And how you have climbed up in the world, to be sure!” he said.
“Have I?” said Jack, laughing.
They talked together for a little while about indifferent things, and it did not seem to Jack that Dennis was as keenly alert as he should have been to the fact of his visit. There was something very disappointing in it. As they talked, Little Coffee stood by, looking him all over. “How’s Mrs. Pitcher, Dennis?” Jack asked, presently.
“Oh, she’s very well,” said Dennis. “She was talking about you only this morning. I tell you what ’tis, lad, she and his honor had it like shovel and tongs after you ran away.”
“Did they?” said Jack. “Well, I think I’ll go over to the house to see her. I’ve only got a little while to stay. We’re going on down the river to Jamestown. Good-by.”
Dennis took the hand that Jack gave him and shook it warmly.
“I can’t get up,” he said, “for this teasing saddle.”
Jack went away over to the house, still accompanied by Little Coffee. Some one had told Peggy Pitcher that he was about the place, and she was expecting him. Whatever lack of warmth Jack had felt in Dennis’s greeting was fully made up by Mrs. Pitcher. “Why, Jack,” she said, looking all over him, “what a fine, grand gentleman you’ve grown all of a sudden! Well, to be sure! To think that I should have seen you that last time sitting down yonder in the cellar so down in the spirits that ‘twas enough to break a body’s heart to see you, and now you to be grown so fine a young lord of a man, to be sure. I did hear say that you joined the pirates after you got away.”
“No, I didn’t join the pirates,” said Jack. “I went down to North Carolina with them, but I didn’t have any business with them. But never mind that, Mrs. Pitcher. What I wanted to say is that I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me as long as ever I live.”
“Won’t you, Master Jack?” she said, evidently gratified. “Why, now, that’s very kind and noble-spoken of you.”
“I don’t see that ’tis,” said Jack. “Where would I have been now, do you think, if it hadn’t been for you?”
Peggy Pitcher burst out laughing. She sat down on a chair just behind her. “Why, I don’t know,” she said, “and that’s the truth. ’Tis like you’d been in a pretty bad way. His honor was hot ag’in’ you, just then, I can tell you.” She became suddenly serious. “I tell you what ’tis, Master Jack,” she said, “things are not going well with him just now, and he’s a good, kind man, too, when he chooses to be so. Do you remember Master Binderly, who used to come here, blustering about his money?”
“Yes,” said Jack, “I do. And how you said you’d pour hot water upon him if he didn’t go away.”
Again Peggy burst out laughing, and slapped her palm upon her knee. “Ay,” she said, “so I did, to be sure. Well, he’s been pestering about here a deal, of late, and I do suppose that’s why his honor’s away so much. He’s been away now for two weeks.”
Just then he heard Mr. Simms calling him outside. “Master Jack! Master Jack!”
“There,” said Jack, “I must go now. I’ll try to see you some time again, Mrs. Pitcher,” and he gave her his hand.
“Well,” said Peggy Pitcher, as she rose, and took Jack’s hand, “I didn’t think I was helping you into such good luck when I helped you to get away that night.”
“Nor I didn’t, either,” said Jack.
Something, he couldn’t tell what, brought the thought of Nelly Parker into his mind, and he felt a quick fullness of happiness that seemed suddenly to brim his heart more than full.
“Good-by, Mrs. Pitcher,” he said, and again he pressed Peggy’s hand.
“I’ve been hunting all over the place for you,” said Mr. Simms, testily, when Jack came out of the house.
Jack almost never enjoyed himself so much as he did those three or four days while he was at Jamestown. Lieutenant Maynard appeared to be very glad to see him, and welcomed him with great heartiness. Almost from the beginning of their acquaintance he had dubbed Jack “My hero,” and he began calling him so now when they met again. “Well, my hero,” he cried out, as he came aboard the schooner from the man-of-war’s boat, carrying his arm in a sling, “and how do you do by now! Well, your old friend, Blackbeard, has got his quietus. Look ye here, d’ ye see, he left me a remembrance before he went,” and he held out his bandaged hand so that Jack might see it. “A great big cutlass slash across the knuckles,” he said.
“I hear the pirates are all in jail over at Williamsburgh,” said Jack.
“Ay,” said the lieutenant, “and it was lucky for you that you ran away in time, or else you might be there, too.” And then Jack burst out laughing.
The lieutenant introduced Jack to his brother officers of the “Lyme,” and Jack often went aboard of the man-of-war, sometimes to take breakfast, and nearly always to dinner. The officers all seemed to like him, and once Captain St. Clare entertained him over a bottle of Madeira for nearly an hour in the cabin. The life aboard the man-of-war was very new to Jack, and he never lost the vividness of his interest in the charm of the wide, long decks, so immaculately clean; in the towering masts, the maze of rigging, the long, double row of cannon, in the life that swarmed above and below – the sailors, the marines, the sentinels pacing up and down, with every now and then a sparkling glint of the sun on musket-barrel or brass trimmings of accoutrements.
It was a great pleasure and gratification to him to be made so much of aboard the great man-of-war, and he was with his new friends nearly all the time. There were wild, rollicking blades among them – men seasoned to the wickedness of the world, who would sometimes sing songs and tell stories after dinner that were not always fitted for a young boy’s ears. One handsome rattle-brained young fellow in particular, who seemed to take a peculiar liking to Jack, was full of jests and quips, that, though they made Jack laugh, were hardly suitable for him to listen to. But Jack’s nature was of too honest and too robust a sort to offer ground for any pruriency of thought to cling very closely to.
