Hocken and Hunken | Page 2

him with an ingratiating smile.
"--A scandal to the civilised world! There's a way to stack ballast, now! Look at it, sproiled about the quay-edge like a skittle-alley in a cyclone! But that has been your fashion, Peter Bussa, ever since I knowed 'ee, and 'Nigh enough' your motto."
"You've no idea, Cap'n Cai, the hard I work to keep this blessed quay tidy."
"Work? Ay--like a pig's tail, I believe: goin' all day, and still in a twist come night."
"Chide away--chide away, now! But you're welcome home for all that, Cap'n Cai,--welcome as a man's heart to his body."
Captain Cai relaxed his frown. After all, 'twas good to return and find the little town running on just as he left it, even down to Quaymaster Bussa and his dandering ways. Yes, there stood the ancient crane with its broken-cogged winch--his own initials, carved with his first clasp-knife, would be somewhere on the beam; and the heap of sand beside it differed nothing from the heap on which he and his fellows had pelted one another forty years ago. Certainly the two bollards--the one broken, the other leaning aslant--were the same over which he and they had played leap-frog. Yes, and yonder, in the arcade supporting the front of the "King of Prussia," was Long Mitchell leaning against his usual pillar; and there, on the bench before the Working Men's Institute, sat the trio of septuagenarians--Un' Barnicoat, Roper Vine, Old Cap'n Tom--and sunned themselves; inseparables, who seldom exchanged a remark, and never but in terms and tones of inveterate contempt. Facing them in his doorway lounged the town barber, under his striped pole and sign-board--"Simeon Toy, Hairdresser," with the s's still twiddling the wrong way; and beyond, outside the corner-shop, Mr Rogers, ship-broker and ship-chandler--half paralytic but cunning yet,--sat hunched in his invalid chair, blinking; for all the world like a wicked old spider on the watch for flies.
"Ahoy, there!" Captain Cai hailed, and made across at once for the invalid chair: for Mr Rogers was his man of business. "Lost no time in reportin' myself, you see."
Mr Rogers managed to lift his hand a little way to meet Captain Cai's grasp. "Eh? Eh? I've been moored here since breakfast on the look-out for 'ee." He spoke indistinctly by reason of his paralysis. "They brought word early that the Hannah Hoo was in, and I gave orders straight away for a biled leg o' mutton--with capers--an' spring cabbage. Twelve-thirty we sit down to it, it that suits?"
"Thank 'ee, I should just say it did suit! . . . You got my last letter, posted from the Azores?"
"To be sure I did. I've taken the two houses for 'ee, what's more, an' the leases be drawn ready to sign. . . . But where's your friend? He'll be welcome too--that is, if you don't hold three too many for a leg o' mutton?"
"'Bias Hunken? . . . You didn't reckon I was bringing him along with me, did you?"
"I reckoned nothin' at all, not knowin' the man."
"Well, he's at West Indy Docks, London,--or was, a week ago. I saw it on 'The Shipping Gazette' two days before we left the Mersey: the I'll Away, from New Orleans; barquentine, and for shape in tonnage might be own sister to the Hannah Hoo; but soft wood and Salcombe built. I was half fearing 'Bias might get down to Troy ahead of me."
"He hasn't reported himself to me, anyway. . . . But we'll talk about him and other things later on."
Mr Rogers dismissed the subject as the Quaymaster came sidling up to join them. Mild gossip was a passion with the Quaymaster, and eavesdropping his infirmity.
"Well, Cap'n Cai, and so you've hauled ashore--and for good, if I hear true?"
"For good it is, please God," answered Captain Cai, lifting his hat at the word. He was a simple man and a pious.
"And a householder you've become already, by all accounts. I don't set much store by Town Quay talk as a rule--"
"That's right," interrupted Mr Rogers. "There's no man ought to know its worth better than you, that sets most of it goin'."
"They do say as you've started by leasin' the two cottages in Harbour Terrace."
"Do they?" Captain Cai glanced at the ship-chandler for confirmation. "Well, then, I hope it is true."
"'Tis nothing of the sort," snapped Mr Rogers. Seeing how Captain Cai's face fell, he added, "I may be wrong, o' course, but I reckon there was two tenants, and they wanted a cottage apiece."
"Ah, to be sure!" agreed the honest captain, visibly relieved.
But the Quaymaster persisted. "Yes, yes; there was talk of a friend o' yours, an' that you two were for settin' up house alongside one another. Hunken was the name, if I remember?"
Again Captain Cai glanced at the ship-chandler. He was plainly puzzled,