Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/134

122 to understand him, and thumped his tail again in an ecstatic affirmative.

But the actual answer came from another auditor, who seemed to be resenting the inattention to his Worshipfulness.

"The Hell you say, the Hell you say!"

The charming commonplace was uttered in a raucous and miscreant voice, but one should be charitable in judging the speaker, for it suggested rather an unmoral than an immoral attitude towards life.

Now Spanish Dick was a bit of a ventriloquist, but he couldn't have been responsible, for his mouth was at the moment gagged by a slice of bread and cheese full two inches thick. The real culprit swung in a cage three feet to the north of him, the greenest, the most scarlet, the foulest-mouthed, and the most ingenious parrot sailor ever trained in the doubtful Montessori system of the seas.

Lady Parrot seemed to have a predilection for bromides of the sulphurous sort. She repeated her observation with the delight of an urchin who does not altogether understand the significance of an expression picked up of an afternoon, but senses it, decidedly relishing its flavour, and the prospect it offers of later shocking his elders at the dinner-table.

For a while she kept it up, shattering the silences with her uncouth chatter, then the three drowsed on the sands, the man soundly, the dog lazily and a little on guard, but the bird with a pale, wafer-like lid, half -lowered over one smouldering eye like a camera diaphragm, which, when any came near, opened in a most vicious close-up, accompanied by a shrieked