"Then we won't either of us bother about those bad boys and what they say," she answered, stooping over and kissing him.
And so for a time the remembrance of Scootsy's epithet faded out of the boy's mind.
CHAPTER XIV
HIGH WATER AT YARDLEY
Ten years have passed away.
The sturdy little fellow in knee-trousers is a lad of seventeen, big and strong for his age; Tod is three years older, and the two are still inseparable. The brave commander of the pirate ship is now a full-fledged fisherman and his father's main dependence. Archie is again his chief henchman, and the two spend many a morning in Tod's boat when the blue-fish are running. Old Fogarty does not mind it; he rather likes it, and Mother Fogarty is always happier when the two are together.
"If one of 'em gits overboard," she said one day to her husband, "t'other kin save him."
"Save him! Well, I guess!" he replied. "Salt water skims off Archie same's if he was a white bellied gull; can't drown him no more'n you kin a can buoy."
The boy has never forgotten Scootsy's epithet, although he has never spoken of it to his mother—no one knows her now by any other name. She thought the episode had passed out of his mind, but she did not know everything that lay in the boy's heart. He and Tod had discussed it time and again, and had wondered over his own name and that of his nameless father, as boys wonder, but they had come to no conclusion. No one in the village could tell them, for no one ever knew. He had asked the doctor, but had only received a curious answer.