“Hum-m! This time o’ year we live off the ‘summer boarders;’ in winter we live off each other!”
“Mercy! I hope nobody is going to live off me--on me!” Sybil bounded into the fern-decked canoe--all agog for comic flight.
“Ye gods an’ little fishes! You’d be a delicate morsel--a choice goldfish--wouldn’t you?” Captain Andy beamed down on her yellow head, his massive brows working up and down like a cloud-bank above the blazing sun-dog--mock-sun--in his eyes. “Well! I’d advise you not to get so near to that big old submarine seal again; he mightn’t be able to resist a nibble.”
“Oh! seals won’t attack you, nowadays, will they, no matter how large they are?” It was Arline who thus thrust her symbolic rainbow into the conversation; she had been paddling in the surf with Flamina--little Green Leaf--whose foreign glances in the direction of the Tall Standing Man were flutteringly shy as spring leaves.
“No, I guess not! They have some awful battles between themselves, but they’ve been persecuted enough to let human beings alone. I saw a seal-hunter--strange to these parts--hanging round this bar day before yesterday. He had come down the Exmouth River--tidal river--in a launch, with a guide, from that little shipbuilding town up at the head of the river to which I was freighting lumber last spring. It’s just humming now, building wooden vessels, all sizes!”
“Oh--that hive! That’s where my Cousin Atwood is working, since he was drafted for labor, putting in his six hours--and more--a day, so his mother wrote me. I believe she’s actually worrying about him.... Between you an’ me, Atty’s an only son--rather a spoiled boy! Never did a blessed thing in his life that he didn’t want to before; that’s my private opinion! Oh! we’ll just have to get you to take us up the river in a launch, some day soon, to visit him, won’t you, Captain Andy?”
Olive, starting up from the sloping sand-ridge, laid a pleading hand upon the massive old “king-pin’s” arm.
“Oh--go to it!” He sighed like a hurricane under the blue mock-sun in his eyes. “I suppose, from now on, I may’s well make up my mind to be shoved about, like a vessel in a rip, for the rest of the summer, while you girls are camping here.... What’s your cousin’s full name?”
“Atwood Atwell.”
“Hum-m. A. A., if not A 1, ain’t he? And he’s one o’ those rich boys--‘candy kids’--who are helping to man the short-handed country shipyards now? Well, I declare! What’s he look like? ’Bout five feet seven or eight in height, heavy build, light-haired, pink-skinned?”