“Well, I don't know. It's live and learn, I suppose, but if anybody but you had told me that magazine folks paid as much as five hundred dollars a piece for yarns made up out of a feller's head without a word of truth in 'em, I'd—well, I should have told the feller that told me to go to a doctor right off and have HIS head examined. But—well, as 'tis I cal'late I'd better have my own looked at. So long, Al. Come in to the office if you get a chance.”
He hurried out. Albert walked to the window and watched the sturdy figure swinging out of the yard. He wondered if, should he live to his grandfather's age, his step would be as firm and his shoulders as square.
Olive laid a hand on his arm.
“You don't mind his talkin' that way about your writin' those stories, do you, Albert?” she asked, a trace of anxiety in her tone. “He don't mean it, you know. He don't understand it—says he don't himself—but he's awful proud of you, just the same. Why, last night, after you and he had finished talkin' and he came up to bed—and the land knows what time of night or mornin' THAT was—he woke me out of a sound sleep to tell me about that New York magazine man givin' you a written order to write six stories for his magazine at five hundred dollars a piece. Zelotes couldn't seem to get over it. 'Think of it, Mother,' he kept sayin'. 'Think of it! Pretty nigh twice what I pay as good a man as Labe Keeler for keepin' books a whole year. And Al says he ought to do a story every forni't. I used to jaw his head off, tellin' him he was on the road to starvation and all that. Tut, tut, tut! Mother, I've waited a long time to say it, but it looks as if you married a fool.' . . . That's the way he talked, but he's a long ways from bein' a fool, your grandfather is, Albert.”
Albert nodded. “No one knows that better than I,” he said, with emphasis.
“There's one thing,” she went on, “that kind of troubled me. He said you was goin' to insist on payin' board here at home. Now you know this house is yours. And we love to—”
He put his arm about her. “I know it, Grandmother,” he broke in, quickly. “But that is all settled. I am going to try to make my own living in my own way. I am going to write and see what I am really worth. I have my royalty money, you know, most of it, and I have this order for the series of stories. I can afford to pay for my keep and I shall. You see, as I told Grandfather last night, I don't propose to live on his charity any more than on Mr. Fosdick's.”
She sighed.
“So Zelotes said,” she admitted. “He told me no less than three times that you said it. It seemed to tickle him most to death, for some reason, and that's queer, too, for he's anything but stingy. But there, I suppose you can pay board if you want to, though who you'll pay it to is another thing. I shan't take a cent from the only grandson I've got in the world.”
It was while on his stroll down to the village that Albert met Mr. Kendall. The reverend gentleman was plodding along carrying a market basket from the end of which, beneath a fragment of newspaper, the tail and rear third of a huge codfish drooped. The basket and its contents must have weighed at least twelve pounds and the old minister was, as Captain Zelotes would have said, making heavy weather of it. Albert went to his assistance.