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But when old Tom Combe looked at her he was proud. His daughter—and like that!
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Old Tom Combe was a curiously humble fellow, with square-cut chin-whiskers and a round-shouldered slump. Almost everyone thought that he was half-drunk most of the time, but he hardly drank at all—a little rum now and then to warm his old bones, and that watered. He was a gentle, helpless sort of secretive old fellow, with a strange haze in his washed-out blue eyes. Life, after a hard drubbing, had surprised him with wealth and two daughters, to whom he gave everything that he had.
Years and years before—twenty-five or thirty—he and two other men known as Brundage and Waller had come to Pulotu. No one knew anything of them; not many people ever learned much, though in the course of furtive whisperings it was said that they were escaped convicts from Australia. Some fellow said that he had seen a scar on Waller's palm that was put only on the worst convicts. A peculiar scar had been on the inside of his hand.