“Look!” he said excitedly. “What’s that? Is that a canoe by the pier?”
They all looked.
“Canoe!” said Delbert in a queer, quiet voice. “That’s the launch.”
CHAPTER XIII
HOW THE LAUNCH CAME BACK TO SMUGGLERS’
When the Hadleys had left Mexico they had turned their steps toward California. They had some friends there, but the place they finally bought was not near any of them. It was many miles inland, too, for Mrs. Hadley had said she did not want to live by the ocean.
“All my life I have been fond of it,” she said, “but now I don’t want ever to have to see it again.”
So they had settled down on a little fruit farm in the interior.
They are not cheap, those little fruit farms of California. The price asked per acre is usually enough to make your head swim till you get used to it, and the Hadleys were not rich, which explains the fact that every cent they had in the world was not enough to pay for that farm. But they paid over what they had and set out to raise the rest from the farm itself. In a few years they had succeeded.
Neither of them was old yet; they could still work, and did work. But Mrs. Hadley’s face was quieter than it had been in former years, though she went about patient and cheerful, a busy, kindly woman much beloved by her neighbors.