Chapter IV: Part TWO: I (2)

Guy Vanton looked surprised, but then an expression of pleasure came into the brown eyes. He nodded. Mermaid continued: “I could come over in the afternoon, sometimes, when I haven’t to help Miss Smiley clean house. We could be very still and not bother your mother. And sometimes you could come to our house. I’m sure Miss Smiley wouldn’t mind. I bring Dickie Hand there and she gives him cookies though she hates his father like anything.”

They were walking along the street together. Young Mr. Vanton had got his cap back on his head at last, but he walked stiffly, a little deferentially, his body half turned toward the girl. Mermaid chattered along easily on whatever themes came into her head, occasionally punctuating her talk with a question calling for no answer more elaborate than a “Yes” or a “No.” She was much gratified when Dick Hand and Tommy Lupton stopped their regular afternoon pastime of punching each other’s heads to stare across the street at her escort. She heard Dickie say to Tom: “Well, will you look? Girls make me sick!”

As if this were the very effect she desired to produce, Mermaid was remarking to the Vanton heir: “That’s Dick Hand over there, and Tommy Lupton. You know them, don’t you? Dick is thirteen and Tommy’s fifteen. I’m only eleven, but I’m as big as either of them. You’re fifteen, aren’t you?”

“I’m seventeen,” he divulged. Mermaid stood still in her astonishment.

“Seven-teen!” she gasped. “Why, but you’re no bigger than Dickie--though you know French and he doesn’t, and you know a lot more than he does and are lots--lots nicer,” she added, by way of retrieving her blunder. “But you won’t want anything to do with me,” she said with honest candor. “You’ll think I’m only a little girl. I suppose I am.”

He did not seem ready to cast her off as infantile and beneath his notice.

“I am too small,” he admitted. “I was not so small in Paris--I mean, the boys at school there were not so large as fellows of the same age here. I was average height. Here I’m a little--runt.”

“What a lot you must have seen,” Mermaid marvelled. “I hope you’ll tell me all about it. You can do that and teach me French that way, can’t you? I’ve never been anywhere except here and on the beach. You know I came ashore in a shipwreck.”

She told him about the wreck, what she had heard of it from her Dad and other men of the Lone Cove Station; of her home with Keturah Smiley, and of life on the beach. Then she spoke of Captain John Hawkins and the clipper ship _China Castle_.

“You know your father commanded her afterward.”

Guy did not seem to know it. “He never talks about his ships,” the boy explained. With the help of some questions from Mermaid, he told her about himself.

He had been born in San Francisco and had lived there for some years. In the Presidio section of the city. As he talked of the town Mermaid’s face took on a puzzled look.

“It’s the funniest thing,” she declared. “Do you know, I have a feeling that I lived there once on a time. It seems as if it came back to me, as if I just sort of half-remembered----You know the _Mermaid_, the ship I was aboard, came from San Francisco.”

After they left San Francisco, the Vantons had gone to live in Paris. Guy’s father had then given up definitely all idea of going to sea again.

“He had really never had a ship since I was born,” the boy explained. “But he kept thinking, up to the time we went to Paris, that he would take another command. My mother----” he hesitated, with a trace of the confusion he had shown before in speaking of her, and then went on: “We had plenty of money, and so there was no need for him to go, but in San Francisco he kept thinking of it, and every day he would walk down to the foot of Market Street and along the waterfront and look at all the ships. Sometimes he would go aboard them and talk to the captains. He used to take me with him. It was very interesting. Ships from all over the world--British, Japanese, American, German, French, Norwegian, Russian and a lot more. He would take me on board the square-riggers and teach me the ropes. ‘This,’ he would say, ‘is the fore t’ gallant halyard. This is the fore royal sheet. This is the fore topmast stays’l sheet. Now what is this?’ I always got it wrong and it used to make him terribly angry. Then he would tell me to go aloft. I liked that, because you could always get such a splendid view of San Francisco Bay and the city, built on hills, and the mountains over in Marin County, with Oakland and Alameda and all the other places spread out before you.”

“Weren’t you dizzy?” Mermaid asked.

“Only the first time.”

They had reached Keturah Smiley’s house. Mermaid invited little, old Mr. Vanton in. She gave him crullers and coffee, made him acquainted with Miss Smiley, and then said good-bye to him at the gate. It was agreed that they should meet the next afternoon _pour parler Français_. As the French instructor hurried homeward he lit a cigarette. This was observed by the Messrs. Hand and Lupton, who were considerably dazed.

“And I called him a sissy,” murmured Mr. Hand.

“D’ye know what I think?” exclaimed his side partner. “He’s a foreigner, that’s what he is, a cigarette-smoking foreigner. Mermaid ought not to have anything to do with a fellow like that,” Tommy concluded, virtuously, and with the sense of the protecting male.

VII

Mermaid and Monsieur Guy Vanton made friends with each other quickly, aided, perhaps, by the graces of the French language. At eleven years it is not hard to learn French, especially if your instructor speaks with a pure accent and makes conversation in it the order of the day. Mermaid found that Guy did not go to school because his father didn’t wish him to, for reasons not given. Guy said he didn’t know what was back of his father’s objections, unless it was that he would have to go away from home. “You see, I’ve had the equivalent of high school,” he told Mermaid. “It would have to be college--or maybe a year somewhere to get ready for college. I don’t much care. I read a lot--we’ve heaps of books--and I--I write sometimes,” he confessed, diffidently.

“What do you write?” Mermaid ventured. “Say it in French,” he reminded her and after he had corrected her question so put, he replied in French: “Mostly poetry.”

He got quite red, so that Tommy Lupton, who had been dishonourably spying from behind a shrub in the next yard, was incensed.

“Some day I’m going to knock his block off,” Tommy told himself.

Afterward he accosted Mermaid down the street, greeting her calmly but with a touch of sadness in his tone. She was a nice, if misguided, girl; Tommy didn’t want to hurt her feelings but this business couldn’t be allowed to go on.

“Say, Mermaid,” he began, and then faltered a moment in the performance of his unpleasant duty. “We--we never see anything of you any more these days,” he finished. It was not just the thing, but it was, perhaps, best to lead up to the point gradually.

Mermaid seemed unaware that anything was wrong.

“Come down to the house, Tommy, and I’ll give you a cookie,” she invited him sweetly.

“I don’t believe I want a cookie. I don’t believe I want anything to eat,” answered Mr. Lupton, seriously.

Mermaid looked at him with attention. “You aren’t sick, are you?” she said, anxiously. “There’s two cases of scarlet fever in Patchogue, I heard. You ought not to be going there to high school if you feel that way.”

Indignation at the turn the conversation was taking overcame Mr. Lupton. He did not want to talk about himself but about Mermaid, and particularly about the dangerous acquaintances--well, acquaintance--she was cultivating. He abandoned the possible diplomatic approaches to the subject and blurted out: “What do you want to have anything to do with that Vanton feller, for, anyway, Mermaid? If we fellers don’t have anything to do with him I shouldn’t think you’d--you’d----” He stuck hopelessly.

Mermaid’s very bright blue eyes were on him and he found it difficult to collect his thoughts and present his argument.

“Shouldn’t think you’d--have him around,” he concluded, unhappily.

Mermaid lifted her chin and her eyes flashed.

“I’d like to know, Tommy Lupton, what _you_ know about him, anyway!”

Just the opening Mr. Lupton craved. He poured it all out eagerly.

“Why--why, he’s a regular sissy, Mermaid, and you know it. He’s a--a hermit. I mean he never mixes with us fellers, and of course we’re glad of it; we wouldn’t have anything to do with him,” Tommy assured her, not bothering the logic. “He’s some kind of a foreigner, probably a dago,” he inferred, darkly. “He smokes cigarettes.” Mr. Lupton, who smoked only cornsilk in secret, saw the distinction clearly. “If you don’t look out some of these days he’ll be putting his arm around you!”

He stopped, appalled at his own frankness. But Mermaid merely laughed.

“He’s _not_ a foreigner; he only just speaks French. He lived in Paris and learned it there,” she said quite easily. “That doesn’t make him a foreigner; besides, he learned good manners, Tommy. And as for his not mixing with you and Dickie and the rest, he’s older and doesn’t go to school--and anyway, you never go near him. I don’t care if he does smoke. _You_ smoke. Only you hide, and he doesn’t! I guess if he’s seventeen and has lived abroad where everybody smokes early he can smoke if he wants to. I guess if his father didn’t think it was all right he’d stop him. If he puts his arm around me and I need your help I’ll scream, Tommy, and when you come I’ll tell him you kissed me at your last birthday party! Will you fight him, Tommy? While he was in Paris he learned all about duelling, and you two can have a duel. I’ll steal one of the swords from our front parlour and you can practise with it.”

Mr. Lupton was perfectly red with rage and white with mortification. He was two colours, and presented an alarming spectacle. Mermaid, done with taunting, suddenly approached him and laid her hand on his arm.

“Don’t be mad, Tommy. I was only teasing. Of course he’s different from you and Dick, but he’s lived in strange places--in San Francisco and Paris--and he’s moved around a lot. And he has a sick mother and a queer father. You’d be funny in his place. And queer. And he’s seventeen, Tommy, and no bigger than you and I are! Don’t you think you could eat a cookie?” she asked, solicitously.

“It’s only--only that I think such a lot of you, Mermaid,” he protested. His natural dignity reasserted itself. “I’ll walk home with you.”

The procession formed, two abreast, and they went on toward Keturah Smiley’s. Mr. Lupton ate three cookies and an apple and examined, with an air of interest, the swords and cutlasses in the front parlour, which he had never handled before.

“Does Vanton really know how to fight with a sword?” he ventured, curiously.

“He had fencing lessons. Not a sword, a rapier,” Mermaid explained. “A sharp point that you stick into the other man. I think I’ll get him to give me lessons.”

“What would a girl be doing with fencing lessons?” exclaimed Mr. Lupton, scornfully.

“Oh, I don’t know. Just exercise. It might be useful sometime,” said Mermaid, vaguely.

“You’re just thinking of something you two can do together.” Jealousy reawakened in Mr. Lupton’s bosom.

“Well, he writes poetry, and we can’t write poetry together.”

“No, but he can write it and read it to you,” the youth said, bitterly. “Wishy-washy stuff, poetry. All except ‘Marmion,’” he qualified.

“Oh, Tommy, don’t be foolish,” sighed the young woman.

An amusing thought struck Mr. Lupton.

“Wait till I tell Dick he writes poetry,” he cried. “Ow! Won’t he yell? Won’t he?

“Just like a foreigner to stab a man with a thing like this,” Tommy continued, imperilling the haircloth seat of one of the “deacon’s chairs” with an unskilful lunge.

At this Mermaid lost all patience.

“He’s _not_ a foreigner!” she snapped. “And if you think he can’t put up his fists you just try him some day. I’ll bet you’ll find you made a mistake!”

Mr. Lupton sulked for a moment, but recovered, and after borrowing a book and eating two more cookies took a calm departure. On the highway, however, the thoughts that had disturbed him returned.

“Just the same I’ll have to give him a good licking yet, I bet,” he muttered. He hoped supper would be ready, for he felt hungry after the strife and passions of the afternoon.

VIII

Richard Hand the elder had come to own all Blue Port with the exception of Keturah Smiley when the balance of power, if you could call it that, was altered, imperceptibly at first, by the advent of Captain Vanton.

“Buel Vanton, Buel Vanton,” said Dick Hand, fretfully, to his wife one morning some months after the studding-sail whiskers became a familiar sight in Blue Port. “Should like you to tell me who this Buel Vanton is.”

Mrs. Hand, whose frequent tattling of village gossip made her more valuable to her husband than he ever admitted, repeated such news as was current. She described, not quite accurately, the mahogany and teakwood parlour, expatiated on the invalid wife, who was never seen outdoors, referred to the small boy. It had got about that the boy was older than he looked, and the father more brutal than he spoke, and the wife as mysterious as she was invisible. The town figured that Captain Vanton flogged the boy, or had flogged him when he was little, thus arresting his growth; probably he had made his wife an invalid by his cruelty. Mrs. Hand repeated and worked speculative embroidery on the meagre facts and unsatisfying conjectures.

“Humph!” sneered Richard Hand, his eyes fixed on his plate. “How much money has he got?”

Mrs. Hand didn’t know. And what made things worse, there seemed absolutely no way of finding out. Captain Vanton didn’t own property in Blue Port, except a lot and the house he had built on it. He didn’t even have an account at a Patchogue bank. He sometimes made trips to the city, but they lived very simply. The only evidence of wealth, after all, was the costly fittings of that front parlour which no one in Blue Port had ever entered since the Vantons moved in. Mrs. Hand did not know of Cap’n Smiley’s short call. Keturah Smiley never met “with the ladies” and never talked any one else’s business unless it was her business, too.

Her husband meditated aloud:

“’F he has money,” he observed, “we might make some effort to get acquainted with them. You could call on his wife. And Dick,” with a glance at his son, “could make friends with his boy. I might stop the Captain on the street some day and ask him how he’s fixed to ’nvest a little money in shares of the Blue Port Bivalve Comp’ny.”

Dick Junior looked at his father rebelliously.

“Say, Pop,” he remarked, “I’m not a-going to have anything to do with that Guy Vanton for you nor nobody else. He’s--he’s a big softy!”

His father looked at the boy with his nearest approach to good nature.

“Maybe that girl that lives with Keturah Smiley--what’s her name?--some kind of fish--might tell you something about him.”

Young Mr. Hand choked on the coffee he was swallowing and rose from the table, though there were three steaming pancakes left of the morning’s pile.

“I don’t see why you insult Mermaid,” he said with a comical boyish rage in his voice. “She’s a--a--nice girl, even if that softy does get around her. Why--why, I wouldn’t _think_ of asking her anything about that fellow. She might think I was jealous.”

Young Mr. Hand went out and wandered disconsolately down the street, thinking miserably of Mermaid and the three untouched pancakes. It was, however, incompatible with his wounded dignity to make overtures to either.

Old Richard Hand, shuffling down the street, looking at the sidewalk, perhaps to see where he was going, perhaps to see where someone else had been, did not observe a large, heavy craft also outward bound but in the opposite direction and on the other side of the thoroughfare. No signals were exchanged and Captain Vanton, studding-sails set, went careering on his way. It was some time later when he showed up at the bare little room which was Richard Hand’s place of business and (except for Judge Hollaby’s office) the Blue Port Bivalve Company’s headquarters.

Captain Vanton was under all plain sail to royals. He was making ten knots or better when he entered the shabby room. He towered over the puny form of Richard Hand as might a great clipper, crowding her white canvas, tower above a fishing smack under her bows. And for a moment he appeared quite likely to run down the village miser. Richard Hand could feel himself cut in half and his wits drowning. He came to his senses with an effort. After all, it was merely the sea captain’s physical presence, aided by those expansive whiskers. Stage stuff! With an inward sneer Mr. Hand got hold of himself. He had always despised whiskers and was clean shaven because he had never been able to grow a beard. A beard would have covered that nasty chin and those cruelly tight lips, and would have softened the look in those eyes. With the benevolent aid of a beard Richard might have been a deacon, as his father had been before him; and he knew it. In a business way, it would have been an advantage to him, now and then, to have been Deacon Hand. Though it gave him the greatest possible satisfaction to collect interest six days a week there was something painful about the fact that none could be collected Sundays. Deacon Hand, passing the plate, would have felt a vicarious joy. The seventh day would not have been entirely wasted.

Rising hastily, the thwarted deacon managed a familiar but far from warming smile. “This is--er--Captain Vanton?” he asked, in a suave tone very few persons in Blue Port had ever heard.

The visitor did not say whether it was or was not. He looked around, as he might have on coming on deck, to see whether the mate was doing his work properly. Richard Hand lugged a chair forward, but Captain Vanton gave no sign that he noticed this. He spoke a few words in his best quarterdeck voice:

“When did you last hear from Captain King?”

The effect on Richard Hand was curious. For a moment his weak and vicious jaw dropped. A look of immense distrust invaded his crafty eyes. Then he seemed to recover himself. Rubbing his hands, as if they were cold, as they doubtless were, Mr. Hand eyed his questioner up and down a moment and then gave question for question:

“Have you a letter from him?”

Captain Vanton, who had not hitherto looked at the village miser at all, now turned and gazed squarely at him, and with so cold and glittering and truculent an eye that Mr. Hand seemed to become more shrunken than ever.

“No,” Captain Vanton told him. Then he asked, “Have you?”

The village miser shuffled and cleared his throat. He mumbled something, a negative apparently. There was a moment’s silence which was broken by the Captain, whose tone had a chilled steel edge.

“Why don’t you answer my question, sir?”

It was not the polite “sir” of the land but the formal, and often positively insulting, “sir” of the sea. Mr. Hand had never been so set down in his life. There was never much starch in him, and what there was went out completely.

“I--I heard from him--why, quite recently, less than a month ago, in fact,” he explained not very readily. “But you--you have later news of him, I can see that.” The Uriah Heep in the man came to the surface and old Mr. Hand exhibited his favourite brand of cordiality--the oily voice and the skimped smile. “Yes-yes. I hope he is well!”

“He is,” affirmed Captain Vanton and added non-committally: “He is dead.”

An expression of shocked surprise appeared on the face of the village miser. He made curious, clucking noises.

“Dear me. Dear me,” he managed to say, finally, as an inadequate expression of his regret that Captain King was well--and dead.

Captain Vanton glared at the opposite wall, resolutely taking no notice of this contemptible land creature.

“How did he die?” pursued the much-affected Hand.

“Violently,” barked Captain Vanton. The mortgage miser recoiled. When he spoke again his voice was feeble:

“I suppose you knew him very well?”

The Captain paid no attention to this. Suddenly he turned and looked through Mr. Hand about two inches to the left of the breastbone and in the latitude of the third rib, where Mr. Hand’s heart should have been sighted by the experienced mariner, if the miser had had any. Mr. Hand could not have been more disconcerted if Captain Vanton had pulled a sextant from his pocket and taken an observation with that.

“Why do you lie to me?” asked Captain Vanton at length, and the tone which had made men perspire off Cape Horn induced a cold kind of sweat on the body of Hand, the miser. It really was the tone more than the words, and surely the words were unpleasant enough.

“I don’t know what you mean. I lie to you?” the land crab got out.

“Certainly. Why, damn your eyes, you know you haven’t heard from Captain King in a month, nor six months, not a year!”

Mr. Hand stuttered in a process of recollection. Captain Vanton muttered something about “chronometer error” and seemed to swell up with a slow inflation of wrath. He might have expanded with this until the pinprick of the miser’s speech punctured the envelope of his maritime self-command, but, as if some thought arrested him, he stood still, and regarded Mr. Hand attentively for the first time. Captain Vanton’s regard was neither favourable nor unfavourable, and it took no account of what Mr. Hand seemed to be trying to say. “A month?” Of course he had been mistaken. It must have been longer than that; much longer, come to think it over. Several months and by gracious! it might be a full year. Time slips by so fast, and he was a busy man with the affairs of the Blue Port Bivalve Company on his hands as well as personal business. Investments. Couldn’t be neglected. Must be watched night and day....

Mr. Hand trailed off easily into an account of the operations of the Blue Port Bivalve Company. He painted its bivalvular prospects. Aided by his descriptive faculty Blue Port ceased to be Blue Port and became another Golden Gate.

At the name of that entrance--and exit--to and from El Dorado Captain Vanton’s large bulk quivered slightly about the back and shoulders.

With fixed eyes he listened to all that Mr. Hand poured forth, saying nothing, storing in his brain, perhaps, some of these wonderful adjectives. Along with the adjectives Mr. Hand delivered a well-assorted general lading of information, in fragments and pieces which Captain Vanton seemed to be carefully ticketing for ready reassembling on some distant pier.

At length Mr. Hand’s discourse dwindled. Would Captain Vanton care to invest in the Blue Port Bivalve Company’s shares? More capital was needed and substantial men, men of affairs. But the man of affairs, after drinking in all that Mr. Hand had to say, shut up as tightly as one of Mr. Hand’s own bivalves. He had nothing to say and said it. Mr. Hand, concealing his disappointment, expressed the hope that Captain Vanton would consider. The Captain, who perhaps thought no answer necessary in view of his very obvious consideration of something, turned to go. And then it was that the same stray thought that had struck Keturah Smiley struck Richard Hand. How did he know of Captain King’s death?

Captain Vanton explained in not more than three words. They were, in fact, the same three words with which he had answered Miss Smiley.

Richard Hand was left all of a tremble. “Killed him myself!” A self-confessed murderer! Good God, what was the world coming to that such men stalked about in it!

IX

Tommy Lupton had made up his mind to knock the block off Guy Vanton, and no suitable pretext or occasion offering, he went around to the Vanton house one day and rather awkwardly invited the objectionable Guy to take a walk with him.

Guy Vanton, with a flicker of surprise which changed quickly into a look of pleasure, accepted the invitation. The two boys started north toward the woods encircling a small pond. They said little to each other at first. Tommy was concerned only to reach a small clearing in the woods, a place carpeted with pine needles and reasonably secure from intrusion by passersby. Guy was puzzled by Mr. Lupton’s stride and a feeling that this was somehow less a pleasure stroll than an errand.

“You’re almost through High School, aren’t you?” asked Mr. Vanton.

“Year more,” returned Tommy, going rapidly ahead on the wood path.

“Shall you go to college after that?”

“Cornell,” Tommy informed him.

“For the engineering course?” guessed Guy amicably.

“For the crew,” corrected Tommy.

“I’ve never rowed,” Guy commented, finding it difficult to make conversation at the pace they were travelling. “Except a little, on the Seine near Paris, just for sport.”

“Bragging of where he’s been,” thought the grim young man beside Mr. Vanton. “I’ll give him something to brag about!” Aloud he said: “Ever box?”

“No. I’ve had fencing lessons. I used to wrestle a little. Nothing else much.”

They had gained the clearing. Tommy moved to the centre of it and then turned and faced his companion.

“I’ve brought you up here to tell you something,” he began, white-faced and with blazing eyes. “You--you’ve got to have nothing to do with--with her--with Mermaid,” Tommy found it distasteful to name the woman in the case, “from now on or I’ll knock your block off. I think I’ll just do it, anyway,” shouted Tommy, his fury, the accumulation of weeks of suffering, breaking forth. “You don’t box, but you say you can wrestle. I’m going to hit you and you can clinch and we’ll see who comes out on top! Being a--a _damn_ foreigner I suppose you won’t fight fair, but if you try biting or gouging I’ll _get_ you, don’t you forget it!”

Guy Vanton, open-mouthed with surprise at the first few words, had reddened with anger. His curious, wild-animal eyes, ordinarily so shy, had lost their light and were fixed steadily but unseeingly on the boiling young man confronting him. The colour left his face. He lowered his eyes, stepped back several paces, muttered, “_En garde_,” and awaited Tommy’s onset.

With a desperate sort of roar Tommy charged. His blood was up, his head was down. His fist shot out but only grazed Guy’s cheek. At the same instant his head struck his antagonist’s collarbone, he felt himself caught under the shoulders, and before he could steady himself he was on his back on the ground. Young Mr. Vanton made no effort to keep him pinned there. Tommy rose and attacked again.

This time he flung himself on the other boy, head up and ready to clinch. But he clutched the air. Something slipped under his arm and caught his leg, throwing him from his balance. As he staggered he was picked up and thrown bodily a few feet through the air, landing on his shoulder.

A sense of awful lameness came over Tommy as he picked himself up. Unsteadily he planted a fist where his opponent’s breathing apparatus should have been, but wasn’t. He felt his head caught in a vise and shoved downward with such violence as to make it seem likely it had been permanently detached from his body. Shoulders fitted themselves into the extended curve of Tommy’s right arm; he half spun about like a tee-totum, and then, having four legs instead of the usual two, at right angles to each other, Tommy was uncertain which way he faced. All four legs gave way under him, his face brushed the pine needles, he turned a low somersault and found himself lying on the soft and scented earth, looking with a blurred vision at the tops of the pine trees and a patch of blue sky. They faded from sight after a second. Tommy was senseless.

Water trickling down his face awakened him, water brought by his late antagonist. Young Mr. Vanton’s black hair was in disarray, his normally white face looked whiter than ever, and his strange eyes were filled with anxiety.

“Tommy!”

Closing his eyes for a moment to consider whether this referred to the late Tommy Lupton or to himself, the young man with the wetted face decided that he would take the chance that it was intended for him. He opened his eyes again, sat up with a painful effort, looked at Guy Vanton, and smiled--a sad, calm smile such as befitted the victim of a mistake. But Guy Vanton seemed to think he had made no mistake. He flung himself on the ground beside the warrior and put his arm about the warrior’s shoulders. The shoulders gave a sharp twinge, but the warrior, with an effort, reached up his arm and crooked it reciprocally about the shoulders of the black-haired boy. So intertwined they sat side by side on the pine needles for a moment, and then Tommy struggled to his feet, the arm of the other helping him. After a moment of dizziness Tommy disengaged himself and held out his hand.

“Shake!”

They shook. Young Mr. Vanton exhibited no air of triumph. Instead, he seemed actually dejected. The two, as by common consent, took the homeward path. Tommy burst out: “You licked me fair and square. I--I’d like to be friends. I--I guess you’re all right. Mermaid----”

Tommy stopped. For the first time it struck full upon him that though he had done all that lay in him to settle matters and settle them right, matters, at any rate the all-important matter, remained much as they were before.

Mr. Vanton broke in: “I want to be friends, too. We ought to be, hadn’t we, after this?”

A point bothered Mr. Lupton. “You haven’t made me take back what I said about you.”

Looking down at the ground Mr. Vanton flushed and said: “Oh, well, you didn’t mean it. It--it’s not important I’m not a foreigner, you know. I was born in San Francisco. I keep dropping into French. You just poke me when I do it. And about--her----” Mr. Vanton broke off, seeming to find the exact words difficult. Then he went on: “You see, it isn’t anything. She likes to hear me talk about France and San Francisco and she’s learning a little French. And--there’s nothing to it, except that I don’t know any one here and she’s company.”

A doubt deep in Mr. Lupton found expression. “I s’pose she won’t want anything to do with me after this.”

“_I_ won’t tell her,” asserted the other boy. He hesitated, then said: “Tommy, you know she thinks an awful lot of you. And, anyway, she’s got to decide for herself.”

To this mature and final view old, young Mr. Lupton assented. “Of _course_! I guess it’s not how we feel about her, but how _she_ feels. Well, I don’t care if I do,” concluded Mr. Lupton, recklessly, taking one of Mr. Vanton’s cigarettes. He lit it, finding the flavour much unlike a pipe of cornsilk. It was not his, however, to pronounce the taste inferior in the face of the world’s judgment. Tommy puffed and felt a strange sense of elevation. “That was a dandy fight you put up,” he conceded. “Say, where did you get all that stuff? Will you show me how?” Mr. Vanton agreed. “I’ve forgotten a lot,” he confessed. “I used to have a Japanese wrestler when I was a kid in San Francisco, and later I had some lessons in Paris.” Mr. Lupton had ceased to listen, however. The curing of Turkish tobacco was suddenly distasteful to him. After a while he apologized: “You pretty well knocked me out,” and managed an admirable smile. They walked back to Blue Port together and Tommy did not even wince at an allusion by the shy-eyed Mr. Vanton to the fact that Mr. Vanton had a longing to become a writer some day. “I scribble a lot now. I even write verse,” explained Mr. Vanton, his innocent brown eyes glancing for a moment into Tommy’s more worldly blue ones. Tommy did not smile or shout. His allegiance to the new friendship was complete and unequivocal; and besides, there was coming into his mind a recognition of certain impalpable things which a girl always fell for and which he, Tommy Lupton, had not to offer. Travel, a foreign language, manners that were polite without being stuck-up, an ability to talk, and a gift of expression; a sort of good looks, too, in spite of the snub nose and the pallor; sophistication extending to the consumption of Turkish cigarettes; and a knack of writing poetry. Tommy, who ached not a little, felt a spiritual depression. What had he to offer Mermaid in comparison with these endowments? He had a good spirit, however; he was a sport and quite ready to exclaim, “May the best man win!” And Guy had won in a fair fight, and he and Guy were friends.

A feeling that school was intolerable crept over young Mr. Lupton. He longed to be with his father at the Coast Guard Station on the beach where, in the fortunate event of a shipwreck, he might alone and single-handed save life.

None of these thoughts seemed to fill the mind of Guy Vanton, who was talking desultorily about San Francisco and Telegraph Hill and the Presidio and the Mission; Paris, boating on the Seine, and streets with meaningless French names. The two boys parted in front of the Vanton house, guarded by tall evergreens, a ship stranded in a forest of Christmas trees. To and fro on the veranda, walking with short steps and heavy tread, paced Captain Vanton, a mysterious Santa Claus wearing enormous sidewhiskers.

X

The way in which Richard Hand senior came to go to Keturah Smiley for money was this: The affairs of the Blue Port Bivalve Company, though generally prosperous, required, at certain seasons, ready money. And despite his $20,000, now considerably grown, Richard Hand could not always put his fingers on it. He had little use for banks. He paid doctor’s bills for babies at about eight per cent., equipped young married couples at as high as sixteen per cent.--for had they not the rest of their lives to pay it off in?--and buried people at an average rate of twelve per cent. This was good business.

He had got all Blue Port under his thumb except Keturah Smiley. It irked him to see walking along Main Street the tall, stiff figure of the only woman who had ever turned him down on a business proposition. He would go over, speculatively, the character, disposition, and probable fortune of his lost sister-in-law.

She owned a good deal of land. Richard Hand did not love land, but this was good land, in one large tract, reaching from the South Country Road to the bay. The larger part was high ground, partly wooded. Through the centre of it flowed Hawkins Creek. Summer cottages, the creek being dredged as a boat basin, or, with a spur of track, a factory site?

When he saw Keturah Smiley he explained, with a good deal of tiresome detail, the affairs of the Blue Port Bivalve Company.

“I won’t put a cent in it,” Keturah told him.

“I don’t ask you to. I don’t ask you to,” Mr. Hand explained, soothingly. “I know how women feel about such things. ’Tirely right, too, ’tirely right. But it’s a good company and in good shape. Only we need money in hand to lease more oyster beds to p’vide for expanding business. Just $5,000 would set us right.”

“Five thousand shucks! I wouldn’t trust you with five cents!”

“Well, maybe you’d trust Horace Hollaby. I’ll pledge the leases with him as security.”

Keturah thought it over. There could be no question of Judge Hollaby’s honesty. A $5,000 mortgage coming due in six months was certain to be paid. Meantime, the bank would let her have the money. There would be no profit in it, of course, but curiously enough, for once she was not thinking of that. She was thinking of an interview many years ago, and of how she would love to hurt this man.

A desire to pay him off surprised and dominated her. She did not see in the least how it was to be done, but if it was to be done this entrance into business relations with him was necessary and would constitute, in some way not now clear, the first step.

“You take the leases up to Judge Hollaby. I’ll go over them with him, and if they’re all right you go to him and get the money,” she directed.

And then she thought--hard.

XI

Keturah Smiley was no fool. When the leases of the oyster beds were made out they were made out in her name, and the Blue Port Bivalve Company had exactly nothing to do with the transaction. Judge Hollaby, purely in his capacity as Miss Smiley’s lawyer, attended to the matter. Purely as Miss Smiley’s lawyer he attended to the details of a loan of $5,000 by Miss Smiley to Richard Hand. Solely as a man, an oldish fellow who had seen a good deal of human nature and knew both parties in the case, he wondered what would happen next.

He had not long to wait. The oyster beds were not extensive, but they were the richest in that part of the Great South Bay. Keturah Smiley, deserting Judge Hollaby for the first time in her life, went to a Patchogue lawyer and formed with him the Luscious Oyster Corporation.

The Luscious Oyster Corporation took over the leases of the oyster beds held by Keturah Smiley and took an option on a large part of the Smiley land. The Patchogue lawyer held that indiscretion was sometimes the better part of valour. He was very, very indiscreet; he was deliberately and extensively indiscreet. And the world that cared about Blue Port oysters soon knew all the plans and purposes of the Luscious Oyster Corporation.

It would build a large factory on Hawkins Creek. Arrangements for special railway trackage were being made. There was plenty of capital back of the new corporation. It had the rights to a new and hitherto unannounced process for making several first-class products from oyster shells. Its oysters, the best, the fattest, the most succulent in all the Great South Bay, would be shipped, opened, in sanitary containers with a distinctive label and carried in refrigerator cars. The shells would be turned over to the factory where, aside from certain novelties and trinkets and toys, vast numbers of them would be used in the composition of a new kind of cement for floors in office buildings and for roofing.

This cement was superior to anything yet discovered for these two purposes, and possibly for others--experimentation with it was still going on. As a roofing it was clean, smooth, of an attractive dull white finish which could be tinted to any desired shade. It was absolutely tight and waterproof and noiseless! The hardest shower, striking upon it, was inaudible. As a flooring the cement had all these advantages and several others besides. It could be flushed with water, and if wiped only partly dry would dry quickly by atmospheric absorption. Footsteps could hardly be heard upon it. If left white it reflected artificial light and enhanced the illumination of the room; moreover, it was, because of its whiteness, next to impossible to lose anything upon it. Tinted, it matched any rug or floor covering. And it was tremendously durable. Prolonged tests with hard substances scuffing continuously over a sample of the cement had not worn away the surface perceptibly, but should it wear away, the texture of the cement was uniform throughout. The worn spot would look exactly like the rest of the floor.

No stock was for sale.

This last announcement filled with incredulity the dismayed Richard Hand, reading the newspapers and gnashing his teeth which were not so well preserved as Keturah Smiley’s. There must be stock for sale! There always was, in a thing like this. What was the use of all this puffing if it was not to unload stock on unsuspecting purchasers? Still, this piece of canniness did not help Mr. Hand along mentally. _He_ didn’t want the worthless stock. He wanted those oyster beds; and most particularly he wanted this talk about the Luscious Oyster Corporation, its plans, its purposes, its enterprise, and its prospective glory stopped--absolutely stopped. It was hurting the business of the Blue Port Bivalve Company, and if unchecked would hurt it still more.

He went to see Keturah.

“Unfair?” snapped Miss Smiley, answering Mr. Hand’s principal accusation. “When did you ever take up the little problems of fairness, Dick Hand? Besides, I have nothing to do with it. I am not the Luscious Oyster Corporation, and sha’n’t be. I’ve merely sub-leased some oyster beds to them and given them an option on a piece of land. Go see Mr. Brown. He’s doing the talking.”

She went to the door with him. “Mind you’re ready with that money when it’s due,” she admonished him.

Mr. Hand was ready neither with money not a retort. He repaired to the office of Mr. Brown, the Patchogue lawyer.

“Absolutely true, every word of it, Mr. Hand,” said Lucius Brown, bringing his right fist against the palm of his left hand. “Ab-so-lute-ly true! No stock for sale. Patents all right. Samples over there on the desk. Tests whenever you’d like to see them.”

“I don’t care for your samples and tests,” snarled old Mr. Hand, showing how bad his teeth were. “What do you want to quit this nonsense?”

“What do you mean?” inquired the younger man, suddenly grave.

“How much money?” shouted Richard Hand, his fingers closing and unclosing. He trembled with rage. The face of the other man suddenly assumed a dark and menacing expression.

“Is this a bribe, Mr. Hand?”

“Call it what you like. I want you should shet up,” answered the caller, doggedly. “Only question is, how much will you take to shet up this fool’s talk?”

Mr. Brown’s face mirrored mixed emotions.

“You’re making a serious mistake, Mr. Hand, when you address me that way,” he informed the miser. “You are badly advised when you talk about paying me money to ‘shet up.’ If you want to make a business proposition to buy the leases of oyster beds held by the Luscious Oyster Corporation and our option on Miss Smiley’s land, I am here to receive it.”

Richard Hand reflected. His crafty glance travelled out of the window and across the street. As if she were there precisely to focus his thoughts at this moment, Keturah Smiley, with Mermaid beside her, walked along the opposite side of the thoroughfare bent on some enterprise of shopping. She was very straight, as usual; her shoulders, thrown squarely back, were inexpressibly odious in the sight of the drooping Mr. Hand. Even more odious was the relaxation of her severe face as she turned to answer some question the girl beside her had been asking. Mr. Hand made up his mind quickly.

“I don’t want none o’ your patents nor samples nor stock,” he declared in a surly and savage tone. “I’ll buy those leases of you for just what they cost me--$5,000.” A thought stunned him. Then he raised his voice almost to a scream.

“Here,” he cried, “what am I buying back my own property for? Them leases is mine. It’s a swindle!”

Mr. Brown seemed interested. A thin foam appeared on Richard Hand’s lips.

“I borrowed $5,000 from Keturah Smiley to lease those beds,” he shouted. “That fool Hollaby makes out the leases in her name. Makes out a note for ninety days for $5,000, my note, and gives it t’ her. Hands me the money and I pay for the leases. I--why, I _own_ those leases. Give ’em back, you robber, give ’em back!”

“Moderate your language or I’ll throw you out of here and down the stairs,” Lucius Brown advised the old man. “Don’t talk robbery or swindling in this office. Now see here, let’s see just what this is. You borrowed $5,000 of Miss Smiley to lease these beds. But the leases were made out in her name. Well, then, man, everything depends upon your understanding with Keturah Smiley. Can’t you see that there are two separate transactions? Can’t you see that it was no concern of hers what you did with $5,000 she lent you? The owners of those beds got their money. And you got $5,000 on your personal note. Did Judge Hollaby conceal from you the fact that the leases were being made out to Miss Smiley?”

“No,” groaned Richard Hand.

“Then there’s nothing more to say,” finished the lawyer. “You put yourself in her hands. Has she broken faith? Did she ever promise you in word or writing any money or other valuable consideration for those leases? No? Was there any verbal understanding with you respecting them?”

“I told her I’d pledge ’em with Judge Hollaby, but when they were drawn she insisted they be made out to her,” Mr. Hand explained. He was dazed. “She threatened to back out at the last moment. She--she didn’t exactly promise anything. She said they must be leased to her. She said she’d lend me $5,000 on my note of hand.”

“As nearly as I can make out,” observed Lucius Brown, “Miss Smiley talked little and made no engagements. You can’t prove anything by what she said, and you can’t prove anything by what she thought. You might succeed in proving your own lack of brains; in fact, you have satisfied me that you haven’t any.”

Mr. Hand said no more. With a look of actual agony on his face he turned and drooped away in the direction of the door. But with the tenacity of a drowning man--drowning in grief, rage, mortification, and dismay--he clutched at a straw. Pausing at the doorway of the lawyer’s office he took a half step back.

“But--now--there’s that option on the Smiley tract,” he stammered. “I might buy that. I’ve been thinking for a long time of buying a likely piece of land. How long’s that option for, and how much would you want for it?”

Mr. Brown considered. “Twenty thousand dollars,” he said, finally. Mr. Hand, recoiling, sneered.

“Twenty thousand! Nonsense! Why, the land itself ain’t worth more’n ten. I’d be buying it twice over.”

“Well, it seems to be a passion with you to buy things twice over,” said the lawyer, reflectively. “It’s an option to buy only, and must be exercised in six months, otherwise it is forfeit. But you must consider that in buying this option you practically do away with the Luscious Oyster Corporation. All our plans are predicated upon dredging Blue Port oysters from a few beds and preparing and shipping them from this nearest available site, working up the shells for commercial purposes. If you buy our option we cannot go on. There is no other site, and there are no other beds except the free beds, unsuitably located for our purpose and yielding inferior oysters. You might as well buy our capital stock, patent rights, and everything, lock, stock, and barrel, as buy that option. Naturally we have to ask a high price for it, even if we only paid $1,000 to get it.”

“You figure your assets, outside the option, at $19,000,” deduced Richard Hand. “Option, $1,000; leases of beds, $5,000; patents and prospects and lawyer’s fees”--here he sneered--“$14,000. I’m to pay you $20,000 and then pay Keturah Smiley $5,000 more for part of that $20,000 worth.”

“See here, Mr. Hand,” said the lawyer, earnestly. He changed his tone to one of warning persuasion. “I have no doubt that when the time comes Miss Smiley will refuse to take any money on that note for $5,000, preferring to keep the lease of the oyster beds. Mr. Hand,” and Lucius Brown’s voice had a ring in it, “this is a dead serious proposition. The Luscious Oyster Corporation, which honours me by misspelling my first name, is no joke. Everything that I have said about it can be substantiated and will be. Every prediction I have made will be verified. What that will mean to the Blue Port Bivalve Company and to you personally I can’t say, because I don’t know and I don’t care. But this much I do know: if you buy anything from us you will not pay too high a price for it, and you will pay for it only once. What you don’t buy you will go without. We purpose to go ahead with our plans and do not expect to be molested; but if you are looking for a fight you can get it right here.”

Richard Hand was facing a man younger than himself, of greater intelligence and better education, a man trained in the law who presumably knew exactly what he could do, and when and how--and how much. There was no knowing what was behind him. It might be one of the banks, Richard Hand reflected. It might be (a shudder) rich New Yorkers; capitalists that you read about. The young man named no names, but this only enhanced the dread stirring in Richard Hand’s mind. The unknown is fearful.

If the Luscious Oyster Corporation once got started it very likely spelled the ruin of the Blue Port Bivalve Company. It would break the monopoly he had so carefully and laboriously built up, take away from him the little czardom he had created, and leave him a poor man.

But $20,000! He was worth, now, more than that. Not so _much_ more, though. It would take away from him exactly the sum with which he had started operations in Blue Port; it would put him back where he had been then. He would have enough left to keep him out of the poorhouse.... Either that or a life--and--death grapple, with the loss of every cent he had!

There was a sort of mist before his eyes as he stood in Lucius Brown’s office. He had never been so terrified in his life. A pain that had arisen in the back of his head troubled him. He seemed to be on fire, all aching; and the next moment he was cold, his head swam, and he felt near to nausea. Gradually every other feeling but the one of fear left him--fear and physical pain. His mind, as distinguished from the head that contained it, was numb. He could not think. He heard himself saying:

“I’ll buy. I’ll buy. I’ll buy--everything. Only I must have my note back. Keturah Smiley must give me my note back.” He began to whimper like a little child. “My note, give me back my note! It’s $5,000. Five--thousand--dollars.”

Lucius Brown turned away in a sort of pity, which was for the man’s physical distress only.

“Come in to-morrow and I will have things ready for you,” he said, sitting down at his desk and leaving his caller to get out as well as he might.

And so it came about that Richard Hand, as president of the Blue Port Bivalve Company, signed a contract whereby the Blue Port Bivalve Company bought the capital stock of the Luscious Oyster Corporation, with all rights, leases, options, patents, etc., etc., held by the said corporation; in consideration whereof the company aforesaid agreed to pay and deliver to the said corporation the sum of $20,000--of which $1,000 was payable in cash on the signing of the contract, and the remaining $19,000 was payable in instalments as thereinafter set forth.

With a copy of this agreement, Lucius Brown handed to Richard Hand the note for $5,000. In the street Richard Hand suddenly stopped, pulled this note from his pocket, and with frenzied fingers tore it to shreds.

“Damn you!” he sobbed.

XII

The relation of Keturah Smiley to the events in Lucius Brown’s office was fairly simple; at least, she and Mr. Brown seemed to find it so. They met later in the day. Miss Smiley was unaccompanied.