One club-footed and club-handed fellow of
forbidding visage protested with hand and head that he neither spoke
nor understood our vernacular. Later, he sidled up to the Hattie's
skipper and said in an earnest _sotto voce_, "Gib me dime." Denied the
dime, he intimated to the Betsy that he doted on bacon, of which we
were each broiling a slice. The Betsy's captain was bent upon securing
an Indian fish-spear, and he pantomimed to the twinkling eyes of the
copper-skin that he would invest a generous chunk of bacon in barbed
iron. The Indian strode back to his village, and soon returned with the
spear, which he transferred to the Betsy's stores.
The conventional Indian maiden besieged the bachelor two-thirds of our
expedition with all the wiles that could be embodied in a comely and
clean-calicoed charmer up in the twenties, who finally bore away from
the Betsy's private stores a fan of stunning colors and other odds and
ends of a St. Paul notion-store; while the guileless commander of the
Hattie, whose cumulative years should have taught him better, and whose
thinly-clad brain-shelter and disreputable attempt at sailor costume
should have blunted all feminine javelins, surrendered to the ugliest
old septuagenarian in the village, and sent her heart away rejoicing in
the ownership of a policeman's whistle courted by her leering eyes and
already smirched by her dirty lips, together with a stock of tea,
crackers and bacon for which her expanded corporosity evinced no
imminent need.
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