IV
LITTLE JOHNNIE DUNCAN STANDS EXAMINATION
By this time I should have gone home, I suppose, and had something to eat––it was getting on into the afternoon––but I didn’t want to have a talk with my mother yet awhile, and so kept on to Crow’s Nest, where I found half a dozen good-natured loafers. Not all were loafers exactly––three or four were simply waiting around before shipping on some seiner for the mackerel season. It promised to shower at the time, too, and of course the gentlemen who formed old Peter’s staff could not think of venturing out in threatening weather.
And there they were, with Peter Hines, the paid man in charge of Crow’s Nest, keeping a benevolent eye on them. Yarning, arguing, skylarking, advising Peter, and having fun with little Johnnie Duncan they were when I entered. Johnnie was the grandson of the head of the Duncan firm, a fine, clear-eyed boy, that nobody could help liking. He thought fishermen were the greatest people in the world. Whatever a fisherman did was all right to Johnnie.
I had got all the news at Crow’s Nest and was just thinking of moving along toward home when Tommie Clancy popped in. Of course that made a difference. I wasn’t going to move while Clancy was around.
“My soul, but here’s where the real gentlemen are,” he had to say first, and then, “Anybody seen Maurice to-day?”
I told him I had, and where.
“Anybody with him?”
“Well, not with him exactly.” I shook my head, and said nothing of Minnie Arkell, nor of Sam Hollis, although Clancy, looking at me, I could see, guessed that there was something else; and he might have asked me something more only for the crowd and little Johnnie Duncan.