"Most like she'd eat them all herself. An' she might make things hotter than I'd like."
Old Captain's eyes were so blue that strangers looked at them a second time to make certain that they were not two bits of summer sky set in Captain Blossom's good, red face. Once his hair had been bright yellow. The fringe that was left was now mostly white. He was a large man; nearly twice as large, Jeanne thought, as her father. He was good, too. Of course, not twice as good as her good father, because she wouldn't admit that anybody could be better than her beloved "Daddy."
As Captain Blossom said, some people take to music, others to boats. Old Captain, however, took to both; but he had but one song. Its chorus, bawled forth in the captain's big, rather tuneful voice, ran thus:
"We sailors skip aloft to reef the gallant ship,
While the landlubbers lie down below, below, BELOW;
While the landlubbers lie down below."
Jeanne hoped fervently that she was not a landlubber. One day, she asked Old Captain about it.
"What," said he, "when you lives on a dock? No, indeed," he assured her. "You're the kind that allus skips up aloft."
One evening, when the sun was going down behind that portion of the town directly west from the Duval shack; and all the roofs and spires were purple-black against a glowing orange sky, Jeanne seized Sammy and Annie; and, calling Michael to follow, raced up the dock toward the huge old furnace smoke-stack. She was careful never to go very close to that, because Old Captain had warned her that it was unsafe; so she paused with her charges at a point where the dock joined the land.
She loved that particular spot because the dock at that point was wider than at any other place. It had been wider to begin with. Then, tons of cinders had been dumped into the Cinder Pond and into the lake, on either side of the wharf; filling in the corners. This made wide and pleasing curves rather than sharp angles, at the joining place.
"Now, Mike," said she, "you sit down and watch the top of that chimney. And you sit here, Sammy, where you can't fall in. Look up there, Annie. What do you see?"
"Birdses," lisped Annie.