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.