Tony advanced upon Peter with fire in his eye. "You're going to let that character get away with this?" he demanded. "I'll kill him first."
"No," said Peter shaking his head. "That won't remove the truth of his birth. What must be done is to prevent it in the first place!"
"By going through with it?" snorted Tony.
"We can all hope for a last-minute reprieve," said Peter. "And until we're shotgunned into it, we can always have a double wedding with the cross-couples getting married. Y'see, Hedgerly claimed there hadn't been either a divorce nor a death-and-remarriage in the family for generations. Now the thing we gotta do is to get married to whom we want, and the only way we can even come close is to get close enough to a preacher to have him do the job. All at once and no one first. Finis, conclusion."
Tony nodded slowly. "Me, I've been half-psychopathically afraid of any Gentleman of the Cloth ever since Hedgerly turned up," he said. "So we can all go and be certain that the other is irreparably and thoroughly committing nonretractable matrimony. Then pooh for Grandson Hedgerly!"
Peter went to the telephone and dialed the number of the private airport. Ten minutes later they were on their way to the port, and when they arrived they looked carefully, but did not see the odious one. They paid no attention to the other plane idling in the background.
Hedgerly arrived as they took off into the blue. His plane was waiting and he leaped in quickly and told the pilot to follow the other plane.
"What's the hurry?" grinned the pilot.
Hedgerly smiled a sly smile. "It's a very long tale," he said. "But the summation of it all is that there are two couples in that ship who intend to get married."