“I may own stock in that concern for all I know,” he laughed. “Would you believe it, child, I’m crazy to find out what I do own!... But, remember, Jerry must know nothing until I tell her myself. Promise me you won’t let the cat out of the bag.”
“Tell her?” quoth she. “Is it garrulous as well as stupid you think I am? If Jerry knew the truth about you she’d die rather than accept a penny.”
“Really?” He was genuinely concerned.
“You’ve got a hard job before you, young man!” She enjoyed his discomfiture. “I don’t know which is the harder, to get sixty thousand dollars out of ‘Red Jacket’ or to get sixty thousand into it. The Wells’ would rather go to the poorhouse than take an unearned penny from anybody. Tell her? You don’t suppose I want to commit financial suicide, do you? Pfist!” She raised a warning finger. “They’re comin’ round the bend; they’re almost on us. I wish you luck, ‘Mr. Richard,’” she chuckled, “and, faith, you’ll need it.”
Around the bend they came, Jerry at the prow of a long birch canoe, the Wheelen boy at the stern. Slowly and silently she swung the slender paddle as Seneca maidens had done on those waters for hundreds of years; and with her brown conventional bathing suit and her braided brown hair she looked the part of aboriginal.
“Hel-lo!” he sang.
“Hel-lo!” came back across the water. There was not a sign of weakness or fear in the long-drawn “lo!” Evidently she was still ignorant of the meaning of all those cryptic entries in her mother’s books.
CHAPTER XXI
POET
Within a dozen yards of the shore Jerry stopped paddling and held up her right hand, two fingers extended like a papal benediction. Anyone brought up in the country knows that silent code. It suggests willows and spring-boards and “sandy bottoms”; and translated into the vernacular it means, “Let’s go swimmin’!”
But Richard Richard had never had a boyhood. Perhaps one of the things that made him so eager to look the world in the face was the fact that nurses and governesses and private tutors had been his portion, and what summers his sickly life had permitted were spent with other sheltered youth in the south of France or in the Swiss Alps.