“But his boss, ol’ Flint——” Skippy began protesting.
“He knowed like you’n me and plenty others that the old boss was a tough egg—and between you’n me Skinner ain’t no angel hisself—but that don’t change his mind none.”
Skippy realized this full well a little later when Marty Skinner refused to hear him, ordered him off the boat, and shouted that his father was a rogue and so was he.
Skippy rushed blindly out of the cabin. The door slammed behind him, the same door that had slammed behind his father on that tragic night. He had accomplished just nothing at all in that cabin of past horrors, nothing except to hear from a gentleman’s lips what his kind really thought of river people.
And he, Skippy Dare, was one of the river people—himself, the son of a rogue!
CHAPTER XII
DRIFTING
Skippy nosed the motor boat toward the Hook. He had no thought of anything save that he was angry and hurt and wanted to feel the fresh, salt breeze blow over his burning face. He felt that he must think over this new and humiliating status in which Marty Skinner had so cruelly placed him, and he wanted to think of it where no one could see the unhappiness that it caused him.
He hadn’t the heart to turn back toward the Basin and home. Home! He frowned at the word, for it seemed that the Minnie M. Baxter and all that it represented could bring him nothing now but recurring thoughts of the hated Skinner. All that the man had said had left its mark on the sensitive boy’s mind and for the first time in his life he felt a bitter hatred toward a fellow being.
That Marty Skinner, old Josiah Flint’s right-hand man, should call his father a rogue, was hardly to be endured. But if it were so, he reasoned in a calmer moment, then all the more reason for the blame to fall on the dead Josiah. Hadn’t Old Flint himself been the worst rogue of all?
He was tempted to return and shout these thoughts so that all aboard the Apollyon might hear. He wanted to tell them what Toby had said about Josiah Flint making the despised Brown’s Basin possible because of his selfish, unscrupulous dealings.