The Lost Middy | Page 5

like a crescent moon to protect the little fleet of fishing-boats, whose crews leaned over the cliff rail masticating tobacco and gazing out to sea, as they rested from the past night's labour, and talked in a low monotonous growl about the wind and the prospects of the night to come.
Rockabie was a prolific place, as far as boys were concerned. There were doubtless girls to balance them, but the girls were busy at home, while the boys swarmed upon the pier, where they led a charmed life; for though one of them was crowded, or scuffled, or pushed off every day into deep water, when quarrelling, playing, or getting into someone's way when the fish were landed, they seemed as if formed of cork or bladder and wind instead of flesh and blood, for they always came up again, to be pulled out by the rope thrown, or hooked out by a hitcher, if they did not swim round to the rough steps or to the shore. Not one was ever known to be drowned--that was the fate of the full-grown who went out in smack or lugger to sea.
The sight of Aleck Donne's boat coming round the point caused a rush on the part of the boys down to the pier and drew the attention of the fishermen up on the cliff as well. But these latter did not stir, only growled out something about the cap'n's boat from the Den. One man only made the comment that the sail wanted "tannin' agen," and that was all.
But the boys were interested and busy as they swarmed to the edge of the unprotected pier, along which they sat and stood as closely as the upright puffins in their white waistcoats standing in rows along the ledges that towered up above the point. For everybody knew everybody there for miles round, and every boat as well.
There was a good deal of grinning and chattering going on as the boat neared, especially from one old fisherman who lived inside a huge pair of very stiff trousers, these coming right up to his arm-pits, so that only a very short pair of braces, a scrap of blue shirt, and a woollen night-cap were required to complete his costume.
This gentleman smiled, grunted, placed a fresh bit of black tobacco in his cheek, and took notice of the fact that several of the boys had made a rush to the edge of the water by the harbour and come back loaded with decaying fish--scraps of skate, trimmings, especially the tails, heads, and offal--to take their places again, standing behind their sitting companions.
Someone else saw the action too, and began to descend from the cliff by the long slope whose water end was close to the shore end of the pier.
This personage would have been a tall, broad-shouldered man had he been all there; but he was not, for he had left his legs in the West Indies, off the coast of Martinique, when a big round shot from a French battery came skipping over the water and cut them off, as the ship's surgeon said, almost as cleanly as he could have done with the knife and saw he used on the poor fellow after the action was over, the fort taken, and the Frenchmen put to flight.
The result was that Thomas Bodger came back after some months to his native village, quite cured, in the best of health, and wearing a pair of the shortest wooden legs ever worn by crippled man--his pegs, as the boys of Rockabie called them, though he dignified them himself by the name of toes. As to his looks, he was a fine-looking man to just below his hips, and there he had been razed, as he called it to Aleck Donne, while the most peculiar thing about him as he toddled along was what at first sight looked like a prop, which extended from just beneath his head nearly to the ground, as if to enable him to stand, tripod-fashion, steadily on a windy day. But it was nothing of the sort, being only his pigtail carefully bound with ribbon, and the thickest and longest pigtail in the "Ryal Navee."
Tom Bodger, or--as he was generally known by the Rockabie boys--Dumpus, trotted down the slope in a wonderful way, for how he managed to keep his balance over the rough cobbles and on the storm-worn granite stones of the pier was a marvel of equilibrium. But keep upright he did, solely by being always in motion; and he was not long in elbowing his way through the crowd of boys, many of whom overtopped him, and planting himself at the top of the pier steps, where from old experience he knew that Aleck would land.
As soon as he