“He’s not a foreigner!” she snapped. “And if you think he can’t put up his fists you just try him some day. I’ll bet you’ll find you made a mistake!”
Mr. Lupton sulked for a moment, but recovered, and after borrowing a book and eating two more cookies took a calm departure. On the highway, however, the thoughts that had disturbed him returned.
“Just the same I’ll have to give him a good licking yet, I bet,” he muttered. He hoped supper would be ready, for he felt hungry after the strife and passions of the afternoon.
VIII
Richard Hand the elder had come to own all Blue Port with the exception of Keturah Smiley when the balance of power, if you could call it that, was altered, imperceptibly at first, by the advent of Captain Vanton.
“Buel Vanton, Buel Vanton,” said Dick Hand, fretfully, to his wife one morning some months after the studding-sail whiskers became a familiar sight in Blue Port. “Should like you to tell me who this Buel Vanton is.”
Mrs. Hand, whose frequent tattling of village gossip made her more valuable to her husband than he ever admitted, repeated such news as was current. She described, not quite accurately, the mahogany and teakwood parlour, expatiated on the invalid wife, who was never seen outdoors, referred to the small boy. It had got about that the boy was older than he looked, and the father more brutal than he spoke, and the wife as mysterious as she was invisible. The town figured that Captain Vanton flogged the boy, or had flogged him when he was little, thus arresting his growth; probably he had made his wife an invalid by his cruelty. Mrs. Hand repeated and worked speculative embroidery on the meagre facts and unsatisfying conjectures.
“Humph!” sneered Richard Hand, his eyes fixed on his plate. “How much money has he got?”
Mrs. Hand didn’t know. And what made things worse, there seemed absolutely no way of finding out. Captain Vanton didn’t own property in Blue Port, except a lot and the house he had built on it. He didn’t even have an account at a Patchogue bank. He sometimes made trips to the city, but they lived very simply. The only evidence of wealth, after all, was the costly fittings of that front parlour which no one in Blue Port had ever entered since the Vantons moved in. Mrs. Hand did not know of Cap’n Smiley’s short call. Keturah Smiley never met “with the ladies” and never talked any one else’s business unless it was her business, too.
Her husband meditated aloud: