“Who’d tyke her?” he replied, with a drop of his lip. “Did you ever see an uglier piece in all your life?”
“What do you mean to do with her?” I asked, knowing that the firm had promised him a passage to Sydney in the _Ransom_, and wondering what would become of the unfortunate Bo, whom he was little likely to drag with him to the colonies.
“You don’t think I’m going to desert that girl,” he said truculently, giving me a look of deep suspicion. “My word!” he went on, “after having taught her to byke bread and sew, and regularly broke her in to all kinds of work, it ain’t likely I am going to leave her to be snapped up by the first feller that comes along. The man as gets her will find himself in clover, and might lie in bed all day and never turn his hand to nothink, as I’ve done myself time and time again at Pingalap, while she’d make breakfast and tend the store. It would tyke several years to bring a new girl up to her mark, and then maybe she mightn’t have it in her, after all,--not all of them has,--and so your pains and lickings would be wasted.”
“Lickings!” I said. “Is that the way you taught Bo?”
“I’d like to know any other w’y,” he said. “My word! a man has to master a woman, and there’s no getting around it. With some you can do it with love and kindness, but the most need just the whip and plenty of it. That little Bo, w’y, I’ve held her down and lashed her till my arm was sore, and there ain’t a part of me she hasn’t bit one time and another! Do you see that purple streak on my ear? I thought I was booked for hydrophobiar that morning, for it swelled up awful, and I was that weak with loss of blood that when I laid her head open with a fancy trade lamp I just keeled over in a dead faint. But there was never no nasty malice in Bo, and if we had a turn up now and then, she always played to the rules, and never bit a feller when he was down; and she never hurt me but what she’d cry her eyes out afterwards and sometimes even arsk me to whip her for her wickedness. My word! I’d lay it on to her then, for I could use both hands and had nothing to be afryde of. Of course that was long ago, when she was raw and only half trained like. I don’t recollect having laid my hand to her since the _Belle Brandon_ went ashore on Fourteen Island Group.”