“What was the name?” asked Ho Ha.
“Ke——” began the lawyer, thoughtlessly, caught himself in time, and changed the syllable to the similitude of a sneeze. “Ke-chew! Ke-chew!” He sneezed again, as though an encore might confer verisimilitude. Ho Ha did not appear to suspect the sneeze.
“I s’pose that cussed brother of mine got a share,” Ho Ha meditated aloud. “The wonder is he didn’t get mine, too.”
Mermaid mixed her drinks recklessly, following a pineapple ice cream soda with a raspberry. It was before the day of the more fanciful concoctions or Mermaid would have had a week of sundaes.
“What are you going to do, Uncle Ho?” she inquired with the interest that, from a young woman, is always so flattering to a man, even an uncle.
“Oh, I guess I’ll build a little shack on the beach and put the rest in the bank,” Ho Ha told her.
“I didn’t mean what are you going to do with the money, but what are you going to do with yourself?”
Hosea twinkled. “P’raps I’ll marry,” he hinted. “Now if I was only a young man——” He looked at her roguishly.
“It’s never too late to marry,” Mermaid said, between spoonfuls. “But if you’re going to marry you won’t want a shack on the beach—or your wife won’t, which amounts to the same thing.”
Ho Ha nodded repeatedly. “I don’t want to marry the first woman that proposes to me,” he announced with his most sagacious air. “I might advertise, eh?”