His breezy bubble of laughter was caught and tossed further by Sally and Arline who eagerly hung upon the novelty of his speech.
“The artist is Miss Loretta Dewey, isn’t she?” So Miss Anne took him up. “She has taken you for the subject of her sea picture: ‘The Breaker King.’”
“Yes. I’m highly flattered. I had other business in this city, too, besides fixing my carnation colors,” with again that boyish laugh stirring the thick eyelashes. “I’ve been in correspondence with a lady here, a cousin of the artist’s, about renting one of my new camps at the mouth of the Exmouth River—tidal river, you know—for the summer.” (Sally caught her breath as if she were fishing for it, rose on tiptoe, stared at him breathlessly.) “The fact is, Miss Winter, I’m tired of being a hayseed,” the ex-mariner went on—“tried it for two years an’ couldn’t take to it.”
“What have you done with your little farm among the Essex woods?”
“Turned it over to my hired man. Oh! he’s a reformed character, he’ll run it all right; he’s got two anchors out now to leeward an’ win’ard, which means he was married a year ago an’ had a son born last month. Guess he had the baby baptized a Scout,” with a twinkle; “he said that ’twas watching the Boy Scouts an’ their manly doin’s that first started him to wanting to hit a man’s trail, at last—make a man of himself.”
But Miss Anne knew that it was Captain Andy who had followed up the unconscious work of the Scouts by taking that hired man, hopeless graduate of a reform school, and setting him on his feet again.
“You’re not thinking of going to sea any more?” she asked.
“No, my damaged spar kind o’ interferes with that.” The mariner looked down at his lame right leg where the sea left its mark on him in his last terrible fight with it. “But I’m gettin’ as near to the ocean as I can while staying ashore,” he volunteered. “I put in this past spring building three big, rambling wooden shanties—they ain’t much more—which I call camps, on the edge of some white sand-dunes, wildest spot on the coast of Massachusetts, where the tidal river meets the bay, or sea.”
“Oh! it’s not the Sugarloaf sand-dunes?” squeaked Sesooā, her voice thin and wiry with excitement.
“Very place! The white Sugarloaf Peninsula! Just a hundred acres, or so, of tall, snowy sand-hills in that part o’ the dunes, and wild life a-plenty on dune an’ river—bird, fish, an’ mammal, or seal! I’ve rented two of the camps already”—went on the speaker, in the teeth of a now prevalent gust of excitement which, blowing toward him, threatened to sweep him off his feet—“one to a family, t’other to a flock; to a lady, right here in this city of Clevedon, who’s going to bring ten or twelve young girls with her, to camp out, some of ’em lately started upon a cruise of their ’teens, others about midway of the voyage,” with a deep gurgle of laughter like the briny bubble of the sea.