“It’s time you’re getting back, young lady!” Mr. Brady called out with kindly gruffness. “Another ten minutes and we’d have been dragging the lake.”
“Sorry,” Madge laughed. “I thought you had more confidence in my ability to handle a boat.”
“If you give me another scare like this, I’ll wish I’d never brought you up here.”
Madge did not take Mr. Brady’s brusque manner seriously for she knew that it masked a kindly heart. He really had worried about her and blamed himself for permitting her to start out ahead of the storm.
“I told Mr. Brady you knowed how to look arfter yourself,” Old Bill broke in, his leathery face wrinkling into a multitude of tiny folds. “I knowed this storm would pass over quick—seen a lot of ’em in my day, I have. I kin remember when I was workin’ on the Great Lakes—”
“Never mind!” Mr. Brady interrupted. “Tell us another time!”
“Yes, sir.” The old boatman subsided into injured silence.
Old Bill loved to spin yarns—that was his particular failing. He was an inaccurate encyclopaedia of everything that went on, but only Madge, who thought him amusing, ever cared to listen.
He could relate the most fantastic tales of his adventures at Hudson Bay and various lumber camps. He had served as sailor on the Great Lakes and as guide to aspiring amateur fishermen who invaded Ontario, yet his real experiences were as nothing compared to those of his fertile imagination. His shack back of the Brady lodge was cluttered with melodramatic magazines which he read by the hour. He did as little work as possible about the lodge, yet if a task struck his fancy, glorified it until it became a task of gigantic importance.
“Your Aunt has been worrying,” Mr. Brady told Madge. “What kept you so long?”