He reached the boat, however, scrambled up over the stern and found three men asleep on the bottom. His heart fell like lead. He had risked his life for nothing; he’d still have to go fishing with the timorous Jacky and the girl must wait.
“Here,” said he wearily to the nearest sleeper. “Here, rouse up; you’m close ashore . . . be scat in a minute.”
The sleeper did not stir. Jacky’s George kicked him none too gently. Still the man did not move. He then saw that he was dead; they were all dead. The boat was his after all! He got the oars out and brought the boat safely into Monks Cove. Quite a sensation it made—Jacky’s George, stark naked, pulling in out of the sea fog with a cargo of dead men. He married that girl forthwith, was a father at eighteen, a grandfather at thirty-five. In the interval he got nipped by the Press Gang in a Falmouth grog shop and sent round the world with Anson in the _Centurion_, rising to the rank of quarter-gunner. One of the two hundred survivors of that lucrative voyage, he was paid off with a goodly lump of prize money, and, returning to his native cove, opened an inn with a florid, cock-hatted portrait of his old commander for sign.
Jacky’s George, however, was not inclined to a life of bibulous ease ashore. He handed the inn over to his wife and went to sea again as gunner in a small Falmouth privateer mounting sixteen pieces. Off Ushant one February evening they were chased by a South Maloman of twice their weight of metal, which was overhauling them hand over fist when her foremast went by the board and up she went in the wind. Jacky’s George was responsible for the shot that disabled the Breton, but her parting broadside disabled Jacky’s George; he lost an arm.
He was reported to have called for rum, hot tar and an ax. These having been brought, he gulped the rum, chopped off the wreckage of his forearm, soused the spurting stump in tar and fainted. He recovered rapidly, fitted a boat-hook head to the stump and was at work again in no time, but the accident made a longshoreman of him; he went no more a-roving in letters of marque, but fished offshore with his swarm of sons, Ortho Penhale occasionally going with him.
Physically Jacky’s George was a sad disappointment. Of all the Covers he was the least like what he ought to have been, the last man you would have picked out as the desperado who had belted the globe, sacked towns and treasure ships, been master gunner of a privateer and killed several times his own weight in hand-to-hand combats. He was not above five feet three inches in height, a chubby, chirpy, red-headed cock-robin of a man who drank little, swore less, smiled perpetually and whistled wherever he went—even, it was said, at the graveside of his own father, in a moment of abstraction of course.