“That’s the truth, an’ I’ll allow every word of it, Jacob; an’ I’m terrible glad you ban’t dead, for you were the first I meant to see come to-morrow.”
Mr. Bates himself spoke. He was a small, wiry man of fifty or thereabout. His clothes were well cut, and he wore a gold watch-chain. His face and hands were tanned a deep brown; his hair was grizzled, and his beard was also growing grey at the sides. His eyes shone genially as he grasped a dozen hands in turn, and in turn answered twice a dozen salutations.
Robert Bates had run away from the heavy hand of Gaffer Pearn some five and thirty years before the present time, and he looked round him now and saw but one familiar face; for the old men had passed from their labours, the middle-aged had taken their places, his former mates were growing grey and he could not recognise them.
“I’ll tell you the whole tale if you’m minded,” he said. “’Tis thirty years long, but give two minutes to each of they years an’ I’ll finish in a hour. An’ meantime, Mrs. Capern—as was Nancy Bassett, an’ wouldn’t walk out Sundays with me last time I seed ’e—be so good as to let every gen’leman present have what he wants to drink, for I be going to leave ten pounds in Postbridge, an’ I’d so soon you had it as anybody.”
Great applause greeted this liberal determination.
“You’m an open-handed chap, wherever you’ve comed from,” said Merryweather Chugg, “an’ us all drinks long life an’ good health to you an’ yours, if so be you’m a family man.”
“I’ll come to that,” answered Mr. Bates. “Let me sit by the fire, will ’e? I do love the smell of the peat, an’ where I come from, us don’t trouble about fires, I assure ’e, for a body can catch heat from the sun all the year round.”
“You was always finger-cold in winter,” said Mr. Pearn. “I mind as a boy your colour never altered from blue in frosty weather, an’ you had a chilblain wheresoever a chilblain could find room for itself.”
“’Tis so; an’ when I runned away to mend my fortune, ’twas the knowledge that a certain ship were sailing down to the line into hot weather as made me go for a sailor. To Plymouth docks I went when I ran off, an’ there met a man at the Barbican as axed me to come for cabin-boy; an’ when he said they was going where the cocoanuts comed from, I said I’d go.”