Billy frowned more deeply than ever, partly because he had no taste for being made sport of by a stranger and partly because the memory of his recent disappointments came back to him with a fresh pang. His plan for this summer had been to camp out in the Rockies, to climb mountains, to ride horseback, fish in the roaring, ice-cold little trout streams and to shoot grouse when the season came around. His father and mother had promised him just such a program; they were all three to carry it out together, being the three most congenial camping comrades that ever lived. However, sudden developments of business, due to the war in Europe and the necessity of turning in other directions for trade, had called his father to South America at just the season when Billy could not leave school to go also. It was during the Easter vacation that he had travelled from his school in the Middle West to New York, to see his father and mother off on their long voyage; then he had gone back unwillingly to face continuous days of missing them and of rebelling vainly against the destruction of his hopes for the summer.
When Miss Mattie Pearson, his mother’s sister, had invited her reluctant nephew to stay at Appledore, she must have realized that the resources of the hotel and the little fishing village that the Island boasted, would scarcely be sufficient to satisfy him. She seemed to have been thinking of Captain Saulsby even when she wrote her first letter, for she had said, “I hope you will find one companion, at least, who will interest you.” She had a great affection for the queer, gruff, bent, old sailor, and must have felt that he and the boy were bound to become friends. And now Billy, standing before the captain himself, shifting uneasily from foot to foot and looking into those small, twinkling blue eyes, was beginning, much to his surprise, to feel the same thing.
“There are some strawberries down yonder in the best patch that I have been saving for your Aunt,” the old man went on. “I’m glad you came along, for this isn’t one of my spry days and I couldn’t carry them up to the hotel myself. I have been expecting Jacky Shute to take them, but the young monkey hasn’t turned up. You didn’t see him, did you, Johann, as you came along?”
“No,” replied Johann hastily, much too hastily, Billy thought, “I saw no one, not anyone at all.”
Billy looked at him in amazement. He did not seem at all like the kind of person who could tell such a lie. Nor did he appear to enjoy telling it, for he stammered, turned red, picked up his bag of tools and set them down again.
“I will go in and mend the clock now, if you don’t mind, Captain Saulsby,” he said, perhaps in the desire to escape further questioning.
“Go right in and do anything you like to it,” the old man returned, “and meanwhile this young fellow and I will go down and get the berries. Just reach me that basket of boxes, will you, and give me a hand up out of this chair, and we’ll be off. The clock is ticking away as steadily as old Father Time himself, but I suppose you will find some tinkering to do.”
He took up the heavy wooden stick that leaned against his chair and that looked as rough and knobby and weather-worn as himself. With Johann’s help he rose slowly from his seat, making Billy quite gasp at the full sight of how big he was. Yet he would have been much bigger could he have stood upright, for he was bent and twisted with rheumatism in every possible way; his shoulders bowed, his back crooked, his knees and elbows warped quite out of their natural shape. He wrinkled his forehead under the stress of evident pain and breathed very hard as he stumped down the path, but for a few moments he said nothing.
“Kind of catches me a little when I first get up,” he remarked cheerfully at last. “There have been three days of fog and that’s always bad for a man as full of rheumatics as I am. I hope you won’t mind very much gathering the berries yourself. I—I—” his face twisted with real agony as he stumbled over a stone. “I find it takes me a pretty long time to stoop my old back over the rows and some folks would rather not wait.”
“Indeed I don’t mind,” replied Billy with cordial agreement to the plan. He had no reluctance in owning to himself that, however discontented he was with things in general, here was one person at least whom he was going to like.