To half strangle the child with a few drops from his whisky flask,
to extricate his canoe from the marsh, and strike out into the
river with his waif, was at least to do something. In half an hour
he had reached the straggling cabin and sheds of Trinidad Joe, and
from the few scanty flowers that mingled with the brushwood fence,
and a surplus of linen fluttering on the line, he knew that his
surmise as to Trinidad Joe's domestic establishment was correct.
The door at which he knocked opened upon a neat, plainly-furnished
room, and the figure of a buxom woman of twenty-five. With an
awkwardness new to him, North stammered out the circumstances of
his finding the infant, and the object of his visit. Before he had
finished, the woman, by some feminine trick, had taken the child
from his hands ere he knew it; and when he paused, out of breath,
burst into a fit of laughter. North tried to laugh too, but
failed.
When the woman had wiped the tears from a pair of very frank blue
eyes, and hidden two rows of very strong white teeth again, she
said:--
"Look yar! You're that looney sort a' chap that lives alone over
on the spit yonder, ain't ye?"
North hastened to admit all that the statement might imply.
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