Mary Kavanagh opened the door to the skipper, and let a fine light slip into her blue eyes at the sight of him. Her cheeks, which had been unusually pale when she opened the door, flushed bright and deep. The young man greeted her pleasantly and easily, and stepped across the threshold. Pat was already out of bed and seated in his chair close to the stove. He was long and thin, with a straggling beard and moustaches, a long face, a long nose, and kindly, twinkling eyes. Though he looked happy enough he also looked like a widower--why, I can't say. It may have been owing to his general unstowed, unfurled, unswabbed appearance. He had not yet fastened on his wooden leg. He never did, nowadays, until he had eaten his breakfast and played a tune or two on his fiddle. His eyes were paler than his daughter's, and not nearly so bright, and he had a way of staring at a thing for minutes at a time as if he did not see it--and usually he didn't. Altogether, he was a very impractical person. He must have made a feeble sailor--a regular fool as a look-out--and the wonder is that he lost only one leg during his deep-sea career. He looked at the skipper with that calm, far-away shimmer in his eyes, combing his thin whiskers with his fingers. He did not speak. His wooden leg was leaning up against his chair.
"Good morning to ye, Pat Kavanagh," said the skipper.
The poet blinked his eyes, thereby altering their expression from a shimmer to a gray, wise gleam.
"So it bes yerself, Skipper Denny," he said. "Set down. Set down. Sure, b'y, I didn't expect to see ye so spry to-day, an' was just studyin' out a few verses concernin' death an' pride an' ructions that would keep yer memory green."
"I bain't dead, Pat, so ye kin set to on some new varses," said the skipper. "If ye t'ought them poor fools ye heard yowlin' last night was to be the death o' me, then ye was on the wrong tack. But I bes here now to ax yer opinion concernin' them same fools, Pat. Yesterday they raised a mutiny agin me, all along o' a poor girl as I saved from the wrack, an' last night an' this mornin' I larned 'em the error o' their ways. Now ye was once a deep-sea sailorman, Pat, a-sailin' foreign v'yages, an' so I wants ye to tell me what I'd better be doin' wid some o' them squid? There was Foxey Jack Quinn; but he run away an' done for himself in the flurry. Here bes Dick Lynch, nigh as treacherous an' full o' divilment as ever Jack was, growlin' an' snarlin' at me heels like a starvin' husky an' showin' his teeth every now an' agin. So I wants to know, Pat, will I kill him dead or run him out o' the harbor? I bes skipper here--aye, an' more nor skipper--an' all a man has to do to live safe an' happy an' rich in this harbor bes to do what I tells him to do--but this here Dick Lynch bain't knowledgeable enough to see it. I's had to bat him twice. Next time I bats him maybe I'd best finish the job? I puts it to ye, Pat Kavanagh, because ye knows the world an' how sich things bes done aboard foreign-going ships."