“Yes. I guess I do. Anyhow, I'd ask some pretty p'inted questions. You see, I ain't lived here in Bayport all my life, and I don't swaller ALL the bait Heman heaves overboard.”
“Then why don't you go?”
“Hey? Why don't I go? And leave Bos'n and—”
“Emily would be all right and perfectly safe. Georgianna thinks the world of her. And, Captain Whittaker, I don't like to hear these people talk of you as they do. I don't like to read such things in the paper, that you were only bragging in order to be popular, and meant to shirk when the time came for action. I know they're not true. I KNOW it!”
Captain Cy was gratified, and his gratification showed in his voice.
“Thank you, Phoebe,” he said. “I am much obliged to you. But, you see, I don't take any interest in such things any more. When I realize that pretty soon I've got to give up that little girl for good I can't bear to be away from her a minute hardly. I don't like to leave her here alone with Georgianna and—”
“I will keep an eye on her. You trust me, don't you?”
“Trust YOU? By the big dipper, you're about the only one I CAN trust these days. I don't know how I'd have pulled through this if you hadn't helped. You're diff'rent from Ase and Bailey and their kind—not meanin' anything against them, either. But you're broad-minded and cool-headed and—and—Do you know, if I'd had a woman like you to advise me all these years and keep me from goin' off the course, I might have been somebody by now.”
“I think you're somebody as it is.”
“Don't talk that way. I own up I like to hear you, but I'm 'fraid it ain't true. You say I amount to somethin'. Well, what? I come back home here, with some money in my pocket, thinkin' that was about all was necessary to make me a good deal of a feller. The old Cy Whittaker place, I said to myself, was goin' to be a real Cy Whittaker place again. And I'd be a real Whittaker, a man who should stand for somethin', as my dad and granddad did afore me. The town should respect me, and I'd do things to help it along. And what's it all come to? Why, every young one on the street is told to be good for fear he'll grow up like me. Ain't that so? Course it's so! I'm—”