Page:Georgie by Dorothea Deakin, 1906.djvu/137

The International "Look here," he said, "I know you'll say I'm an awful ass, but I believe any decent chap would have done the same thing."

"Oh!" Drusilla gazed at me.

"I was in Pwllheli," Georgie began desperately, "doing a bit of mackerel fishing, and it was one day when we couldn't whistle up a wind anyhow. The men wouldn't take the boat out—couldn't, in fact—and I can't stick that dirty flat-fishing business in the harbor, so I just loafed about the old town, down in the fishermen's quarters, and that was when I first saw old Taffy."

"Old what?"

He laughed.

"Taffy I call him. He's Welsh, you see. He was going for a lot of other little lads, swearing and spitting at 'em like anything in his ridiculous native tongue. They'd taken his football, I think, and he meant to get it back. He got it too, like a good 'un. It was only an old salmon tin, but it was the nearest thing the poor 121