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His sea-tanned face showed a deeper shade under Leaver's praise. Leaver himself smiled at the averted profile of his friend, and went on, while Ellen looked at him as if he had given her something which money could not buy. "I wish," said John Leaver, laying a firm-knit hand on Burns's knee, "you'd come to Baltimore, Red. Between us we'd do some things pretty well worth doing.
I could imagine the great day of certain purchases, the bewildering shops of the next large town, the aspiring anxious woman, the clumsy sea-tanned man in his best clothes, so eager to be pleased, but at ease only when they were safe back in the sailboat again, going down the bay with their precious freight, the hoarded money all spent and nothing to think of but tiller and sail.
The future loomed before him like a tragedy; he almost groaned aloud, for swinging towards him with a loose-jointed English gait was a tall, yellow-haired chap, the size of a man, with a face sea-tanned between a pink and a brown, his long neck encircled with a very high, very stiff collar, his light grey suit pressed as if it had just arrived from the tailor's, and poor Banty's quick eye flew from the smiling pink face to the faultlessly-trousered legs horrors!
"'Tis so lawnly betimes!" he pleaded. And Bess set his longing heart at rest. "So soon as vather can spare I, Ben," she said; and she laid her knitting on the rock beside them, and drew his sea-tanned face close down beside her own. "Ee dawn't seek fer I more'n I seek fer ee, deary!" and kissed him. Thus they plighted their troth. Then came the winter and the hard work.
All at once he started and nearly dropped the glass, as he wrenched himself right round to gaze back and up, for a gruff voice had suddenly cried: "Hullo!" The next moment the boy, was gazing in a fierce pair of very dark eyes belonging to a swarthy, scowling, sea-tanned face, the lower part of which was clothed in a crisp black beard, as black as the short head of hair.
At a slap on the shoulder he turned about, showing to the merchant a ruddy, sea-tanned skin, light brown hair, gray eyes, and a chin and mouth hidden by a two months' beard, still too bristly to give him other than an unkempt, boorish look. "Here 's the rogue," announced the captain, with a suggestion of challenge in the speech, as if he would like to have the epithet resented.
My young ears were quick to hear the news of a ship's having come into port, and I delighted in the elderly captains, with their sea-tanned faces, who came to report upon their voyages, dining cheerfully and heartily with my grandfather, who listened eagerly to their exciting tales of great storms on the Atlantic, and winds that blew them north-about, and good bargains in Havana, or Barbadoes, or Havre.
Their sea-tanned faces, whiskered or shaved, lean or full, with the intent wrinkled sea-eyes of the pilot-breed, and here and there a thin gold hoop at the lobe of a hairy ear, bent over my sea-infancy. The first operation of seamanship I had an opportunity of observing was the boarding of ships at sea, at all times, in all states of the weather. They gave it to me to the full.
Yes, the cave has seen many a fierce, sea-tanned face and tarry pigtail, and echoed to strange oaths and wild sea-songs. Men had carved those steps in the passage thirty-two of them. In the sand of the floor, as I kicked it up with my feet, hoping rather childishly to strike the corner of the chest, I found the hilt and part of the blade of a rusty cutlass, and a chased silver shoe-buckle.
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