“Great Neptune, I’d as lief be with Davy Jones as to live with that woman’s scarecrow tongue; she’s always ridden by a nightmare or a daymare or something.” Captain Andy sprang to his feet again with nautical restlessness, but he did not pace the orchard; he stood glaring down in a half-savage, half-tender way on Kitty.
“What did she say—what scare was she passing on to somebody then? Now, out with it—no bushwhacking—no beatin’ about the bush—you can’t get by me, you know!”
Kitty rubbed the back of a freckled little hand against her right eye and her right dimple blossomed forth; already she was feeling better, deriving a comfort which neither Mary-Jane nor the topknot duck nor any other member of her animal kingdom could impart; if this heroic granduncle of hers would rather depart this life with Davy Jones (the fabulous gentleman who summons sailors when death claims them at last) than to live with the tongue and the scares of Mrs. Hannah Beals, her aunt by marriage, then, perhaps, there wasn’t much in the spiky scare which the said Aunt Hannah had planted in her heart three months earlier.
“She said I was the livin’ image of my Aunt Lottie, father’s sister, who died when she was less than seventeen,” returned Kitty sedately. “Then Aunt Kate said she thought I looked a little peaked and thin—that I ought to go round more with girls of my own age.”
“So you ought! An’ that’s what I’m going to talk to you about presently,” put in the listener. “Well! an’ did Aunt Hannah drive the nightmare then?” laughingly.
“She said that she didn’t see as ’twould do much good for me to go round more with girls an’ boys, go to their parties an’ such-like, because I was so like my Aunt Lottie in looks and ways that it seemed borne in on her—that’s what she said—that I’d start a cough one o’ these fine days, not far off, and go as Aunt Lottie did; an’ that I was looking more like it every day, getting thinner”—sniff—Kitty wiped away a tear.
“Gosh! I wish I had the keelhauling of that woman; she’d go down under a vessel’s keel an’ she’d never come up again! Now, Kitty child, listen to me!” Captain Andy touched the child’s shoulder. “And take it from me as straight that you’re like your Aunt Lottie”—Kitty sniffed forlornly again—“and you’re not like her; she was a grain taller an’ a bit narrower in the chest than you are,” critically eyeing the small green figure in the shrunken muslin dress. “But, even with that handicap, she wouldn’t have faded away before she was seventeen—not a bit of it—if she’d got it fast in her head, like those Camp Fire Girls who are in one of my camps over on the Sugarloaf sand-dunes, that to ‘Hold on to Health’ comes pretty near being the strongest point in the law of life.
“She was ambitious about her studies; she had her heart set on going to college; it was, with her, come home from high school, peck at her dinner, then out into this orchard, not to swap gossip with a pig an’ a crested duck, but to sit in a hammock with a study-book, or if ’twas winter, she’d be half the afternoon poring over that book or another, in her own little bedroom, maybe, and come down, weazened an’ blue-nosed”—sadly—“to peck like a bird at her supper. I told her mother that Lottie was going ahead on that tack under more sail than she could carry. ‘Take her out o’ school,’ I said; ‘turn her loose in the woods. I’ll teach her to swim an’ dive until she’s as much at home in the water as a young harbor-seal and has the appetite of a shark!’ ... Land! there’s a fine bathing-beach half-a-mile from this orchard, but she couldn’t swim any farther than that pedigreed pig there, ’bout the only animal that can’t hold its own in the water. Can you? Can you swim farther than Mary-Jane Peg?” He frowned fiercely on Kitty.
“Ye-es—with water-wings,” she faltered, “I can swim ten yards.”
“‘Ten yards! Water-wings!’ Gumph! An’ you of my breed! That’s the way with about half the boys an’ girls on this cape, of sea-faring stock, too! Can’t swim a stroke until some summer visitor who spends nine-tenths o’ the year away from the ocean takes pity on ’em and teaches ’em—then they’ll hand his name down to their children as a water-god who had Neptune ‘skun a mile.’” Honk! Captain Andy’s angry laughter scaled the bandaged tree.