Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/179

 "A Governor-General has pickings, I can tell you," said Jacob.

"But who'll go?" said Asher.

"Go? Hum! What? The deuce! Well, I mightn't refuse to go myself," said Jacob.

"And maybe I wouldn't mind going with you," said John.

And so it was settled. But the other four said to themselves, "What about the pickings?" and then each, of himself, concluded secretly that if Jacob and John went to Iceland, Jacob and John would get all that was to be got by going, and that to prevent such cheating it would be necessary to go with them.

paid the last of his debts in the Isle of Man, and then set sail for Iceland with less money in his pocket than Adam Fairbrother had carried there. He knew nothing of the whereabouts or condition of the man he was going to seek, except that Michael Sunlocks was at Reykjavík; for so much, and no more, he had read of the letter that the Fairbrothers put into his hands at Lague. The ship he first sailed by was a trader between Copenhagen and the greater ports of Scotland and Ireland, but at the Danish capital he secured a passage in a whaler bound for Reykjavík. His double voyage covered more than six weeks, though there was a strong fair wind from the coast of Scotland to the coast of Denmark, and again from Denmark to Iceland. The delay fretted him, for his heart was afire; but there was no help for it, and he had to submit. He did so with no cheer of spirit, or he might have learned something from the yarns of the seamen. All the gossip that came his way was a chance remark of the master, a Dane, who one day stopped in front of him as he lay by the hatches, and asked if he was an Icelander born. He answered that he was. Was he a sea-going man? Yes. Ship broken, maybe, in some foreign country? That was so. How long had he been away from Iceland? Better than four years.

"You'll see many changes since that time," said the master, "Old Iceland is turned topsy-turvy."

Jason understood this to mean some political revolution, and turned a deaf ear to it, for such things seemed but sorry trifling to one with work like his before him. 4em