Suddenly Sesooā skipped to her feet and began kicking at the pale sands like an explorer.
“O dear!” she gasped, trying to be funny, and failing, “why can’t what the Kullibígan guessing-top promised come true and some of us dig up a fortune from the sands?”
“Not much likelihood of that! Besides the fortune-telling top was so divided in its spinning mind about who was to find it!” Morning-Glory laughed chokingly.
“And aren’t there any other living relatives of your mother’s?”
“Yes, one—my dear, handsome great-gran’father in the old miniature!” The speaker dimpled through the tear-stains on her cheeks, her voice rocked between a sob and a song, her white teeth flashed at the dead-low tide which was just on the turn and thinking of flowing back again. “He’s alive to me! I wish I had brought the ivory miniature down here with me; then you girls would have fallen in love with him in his blue coat and brass buttons—he has the livingest, merriest smile—the miniature was painted when he was a very young man; he was over forty when he was drowned, sticking to his ship and one helpless passenger to the last, while most of the crew tried to escape in boats.”
“I should think you’d like to go over to the old town of Newburyport where you told me he once lived and see it—it’s not so awfully far from here by motor-boat and train.”
At this Jessica winced again; such a longing had been in her breast all summer, but she was a loyal, loving girl who hated to draw more than was necessary on Cousin Anne’s resources while in camp and even a forty-mile, roundabout journey would cost something.
“My great-grandfather, Captain Josiah Dee, only sailed out of Newburyport and down the Merrimac River, over the sand-bar at its mouth, when his ship, The Wave Queen, was simply ‘ballasted,’ so Mother told me; then he’d make a long trip to the West Indies and when he came back heavily loaded—or the ship was—he’d put into Baltimore or New York,—some big seaport! He made a good deal of money, but spent nearly all of it; his wife died in 1839 and the next year he went away on his last voyage; before he came back his only son, my grandfather, heard a rumor of gold in California and started off there to make a fortune, taking only the miniature in a wooden case that he made for it and a little old Bible with him.”
“Did he make a fortune?”
“No, he never got farther than the Isthmus of Panama; it was so hard to reach the Pacific Coast in those days. He was sick after landing on the Isthmus and stayed there a long time. Any letters that may have been sent never reached him. At last he got back to America, to New York, and there heard that The Wave Queen had been wrecked on her last voyage and every one aboard her, captain and crew, lost.”