“Well, now,” Grandfather had said, “that’s very decent of you, Mr. Caldwell. But why should you go to all this trouble and expense?”
“I was hoping, sir,” Caldwell had answered, “that you and Ronnie might consider letting me select a few pieces of the Rorth glassware. That would more than repay me.”
Caldwell left a week later with the papers the lawyer had drawn up. He promised to return as soon as he’d visited his brother. “I’ve got plenty of work left on my book,” he had told Ronnie, “so keep my place cleaned and ready for me!”
When Ronnie and Phil reached the house, supper was already on the table. Grandfather was dressed in his best summer suit with a white shirt and necktie. “How come, Grandpa?” Phil asked.
“How come? Why, you don’t think for one minute I’m going to miss that meeting tonight. Thunderation, they won’t get anywhere unless I’m there to lend a hand.”
Grandfather did lend his hand that night—and his voice, too! But it was Ronnie’s plea, perhaps, which did the most toward convincing the Seaway official that the village had to be saved. “Mister,” Ronnie told him, sitting on one side of the long conference table, “every building down in the village has got a story to tell about its past. Gramps told me all of them when I was a boy, and I’ve never forgotten a one. Lots of these stories I’ve told to the tourists who have come to see the village. And do you know what so many of them have said to me when they left? They said they’d never been anywhere that helped them so much to understand how people lived and worked back in the last century. And if the village can be saved, you know what we can do? Well, we’ve got enough of the old furnishings left from the general store, for instance, to fit it out just like it was a hundred years ago. And Gramps says that with some fixing up we can do the same thing for the gristmill, the smith shop, and even the main glassworks. Can’t we, Gramps?” Ronnie asked, smiling across at his grandfather.
“Why, you bet we can, boy! That village is just chuck-full of history.”
After the meeting Mr. Mercer, Ronnie’s grandfather and father, a lawyer whom the historical society had hired, and the official from the Seaway went into a smaller room in the back of the building and closed the door. Ronnie, Phil, and Bill waited in the car. It was almost an hour later before Gramps and Dad joined them.
Grandfather was smiling. “Well, we did it, lad!” he said to Ronnie and the others. “We’ve got ourselves a proposition that’ll save the village.”
During the ride home Gramps did most of the talking. “You’ve got to put in the money you boys have earned and the money you found,” he explained the terms of the agreement. “The historical society will lend another three thousand—you’ve got to pay that back, Ronnie, from money you get showing people around the village. The Seaway will pay the rest of the bill, build the dam, and maintain it.”