The Lost Middy | Page 5

boy sat fast, rudder in one hand, sheet in the other, ready at the
right moment to ease off the rope and by a dexterous touch at the
rudder to lessen the pressure upon the canvas so that the boat rose again
and raced onward till the great promontory ahead was passed. In due
time the land sheltered the young navigator, and he glided swiftly into
the little harbour of the fishing town, whose roughly-formed pier
curved round 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