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"How about you, Zebedee?" demanded the captain of the Seamew. "I am not afraid of any foolish talk, anyway, Captain Latham. Had I been I wouldn't have applied for the berth. I had heard enough about it. Eunez Pareta, I believe, talked too much to the Portygees, and that is why you couldn't keep them. But I'm not a Portygee." "I'll say you're not," agreed Tunis.
They came riding through safely on a roller, splattered across the cove with wildly waving oars, and landed on the sand with a bump that sent them tumbling heels over head out of the little boat. "Four Portygee sailors, the cook, and the second mate," elucidated Cap'n Sproul, oracularly, for his own information.
But, now I've got this cable snug, jist you come along o' me, me bhoy, an' we'll say what that Portygee stooard hez lift in his panthry; for I've got no proper mess yit an' have to forage in the cabin."
It must have been preternatural sagacity which caused him to see and recognize the broken oar. Having seen it, he jumped for the head of the wharf. Tunis leaped away on his cousin's trail. The crowd parted to let them through, and then joined in a streaming, excited tail to their kite of progress. Most of the spectators lived in Portygee Town.
He never particularly remarked her presence or her smile as being for him alone. It was that Eunez did not count in any of his calculations. "That girl at Cap'n Ball's place, Tunis," said the Portygee girl. "Does she like it up there?" "Oh, yes! She's getting on fine," was his careless response. "And will they keep her?" "Of course they will keep her." He laughed.
"If the Seamew is a Jonahed schooner, it is because of something different. Yes!" "Bah!" cried Eunez, yet with continued eagerness. "Tell me what it may be if it is not that girl with the evil eye?" "Ask 'Rion Latham," whispered Johnny. "You know him huh?" The Portygee girl looked for a moment rather taken aback. Then she said, tossing her head: "What if I do know 'Rion?"
The girls, although they agreed that he was "stand-offish and kind of queer," voted him "just lovely, all the same." Their envious beaux referred to him sneeringly among themselves as a "stuck-up dude." Some one of them remembered having been told that Captain Zelotes, years before, had been accustomed to speak of his hated son-in-law as "the Portygee."
Was it what Captain Zelotes used to call the "Portygee streak" which was now cropping out? The opera singer had been of the butterfly type in his later years a middle-aged butterfly whose wings creaked somewhat but decidedly a flitter from flower to flower. As a boy, Albert had been aware, in an uncertain fashion, of his father's fondness for the sex.
"Oh, he was a queer old one-armed Portygee who lived down along," said my aunt, "clear down along under the sand dunes in a green-painted house with a garden in front of it with as many colors as Joseph's coat. Those Costas lived 'most any way." Then my aunt added, over her shoulder: "They say the old woman was a gypsy and got married to one-armed Manel jumping over a broomstick.
"'Twasn't much account; just a sort of confession, and they say that's good for the soul. I was just goin' to say that when you first came here I was prejudiced against you, not only because your father and I didn't agree, but because he was what he was. Because he was was " Albert finished the sentence for him. "A Portygee," he said. "Why, yes, that's what I called him.
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