“I will. I’ve bought a piece of land over there on the edge of the woods, lad; it ain’t more’n half cleared yet. I’m intending to start a farm. But I don’t know much about farming; that’s the truth!” The grand old Viking looked almost pathetically helpless. “But you’ve worked on a farm, Dave, when you were a boy and since: if you want to take hold an’ help me—if you want to stick to work an’ make good—this is your chance!”
An inarticulate sound from the vaurien; it sounded like a sob bitten in two by clenched teeth!
“The two boys who were with the officers who arrested you told me that you declared you’d been hangin’ round the Sugarloaf Dunes lately, watching those scouts at their signaling stunts an’ the like, an’ wishing that you’d had the chance they have now, when you were a boy. Well! theirs is a splendid chance—better than boys ever had before, it seems to me—of joining the learning o’ useful things with fun.” Captain Andy planted an elbow emphatically upon a little table near him. “Now! Dave, you don’t want to let those boy scouts be the ones to do the good turns for your old mother that you should do? If you ain’t set on breaking her heart altogether—if you want to be a decent citizen of the country that raises boys like these scouts—if you want to see your own sons scouts some day—well, give us your fin, lad!”
The captain’s voice dropped upon the last words, the semi-comical wind-up of a peroration broken and blustering in its earnestness.
There was a repetition of the hysterical sound in Dave Baldwin’s throat which failed to pass his gritting teeth. He did not extend his hand at Captain Andy’s invitation. But his shoulders heaved as he turned his head away; and the would-be benefactor was satisfied.
“And so Captain Andy is going to stand back of Dave Baldwin and give him another chance to make good in life!” said the Exmouth doctor, member of the Local Council of Boy Scouts, when he heard what had come of the vagrant’s arrest. “That’s like Andy! And I don’t think he’ll have much difficulty with the district attorney; nobody really believes that Baldwin started that fire maliciously, and the district attorney will be very ready to listen to anything Captain Andy has to say!”
Here the doctor’s eye watered. He was recalling an incident which had occurred some years before at sea, when the son of that district attorney, who did not then occupy his present distinguished position, and the doctor’s own son, with one or two other young men of Dave Baldwin’s age, had been wrecked while yachting upon certain ragged rocks of Newfoundland, owing to their foolhardiness in putting to sea when a storm was brewing.
At daybreak upon an October morning their buffeted figures were sighted, clinging to the rocks, by the lookout on the able fishing vessel, Constellation, of which Captain Andrew Davis was then in command.
The furious gale had subsided. But as Captain Andy knew, the greatest danger to his own vessel lay in the sullen and terrible swell of the “old sea” which it had stirred up.