Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/236

 No answer. He did not even turn around. He sat looking, apparently, at the pound nets in the meadow across the road.

"Hungry?" the captain asked, and he replied with an unintelligible dumb grunt.

"Well," the captain said, "come along and have a drink first."

He rose painfully and followed into the bar, silent, looking at the floor. The captain decided he was either dumb or had "a button loose somewhere." He would not speak. He would not look at them. He gulped down his whisky straight, turned at once and shuffled back to his place on the steps. The captain ordered a plate of dinner sent out to him. He took it, as silent as a dog, and ate it from his fingers, discarding the knife and fork, his back to them all.

"Give 'm anything he wants," the captain ordered, shook his head—with pity—and went home to his own meal.

He was an old man himself, with a white head of hair and a white fringe of whiskers so fine and so fluffy that he looked like a "four-o'clock"—like a ripe dandelion gone to seed—with his pink scalp glowing through its aureole and his tanned skin brown under his beard. There are babies that look like wise and solemn old men. Captain Jim looked like one of those babies in a beard; and his favorite oath—"By damn"—came wonderingly from a small mouth of red lips that sucked