“No, I'm not going to hush. I'm proud of my father. He was a—a great man. And—and I'm not going to stand here and have you—”
Between indignation and emotion he choked and could not finish the sentence. The tears came to his eyes.
“I'm not going to have you or anyone else talk about him that way,” he concluded, fiercely.
His grandfather regarded him with a steady, but not at all unkindly, gaze.
“I ain't runnin' down your father, Albert,” he said.
“Yes, you are. You hated him. Anybody could see you hated him.”
The captain slowly rapped the desk with the pencil. He did not answer at once.
“Well,” he said, after a moment, “I don't know as I ought to deny that. I don't know as I can deny it and be honest. Years ago he took away from me what amounted to three-quarters of everything that made my life worth while. Some day you'll know more about it than you do now, and maybe you'll understand my p'int of view better. No, I didn't like your father—Eh? What was you sayin'?”
Albert, who had muttered something, was rather confused. However, he did not attempt to equivocate. “I said I guessed that didn't make much difference to Father,” he answered, sullenly.
“I presume likely it didn't. But we won't go into that question now. What I'm tryin' to get at in this talk we're having is you and your future. Now you can't go back to school because you can't afford it. All your father left when he died was—this is the honest truth I'm tellin' you now, and if I'm puttin' it pretty blunt it's because I always think it's best to get a bad mess out of the way in a hurry—all your father left was debts. He didn't leave money enough to bury him, hardly.”