River people? Skinner didn’t know what he was talking about! He, Skippy Dare, was proud to be one of the river people.
CHAPTER XVII
MUGS
Many delightful weeks Skippy spent after he was up and around. Day after day, he and Big Joe roamed the length and breadth of the river, and often they went down the bay and across to some unfrequented beach where they swam and fished to their hearts’ content.
Skippy soon showed the effects of his healthful life and Mrs. Duffy’s fine cooking. He was browned from head to foot and his flat chest had expanded two inches. And what was more, he had learned to triumph over tears.
That in itself was a great achievement, for he had great need to practice self-control during the fall and the winter following. The gods themselves seemed to have cast sorrowful glances over the Minnie M. Baxter and Skippy’s mettle was tried to the breaking point sometimes, yet always he came up smiling. Very often it was a poignant smile, the kind that pierced Big Joe Tully’s almost invulnerable heart and set him to doing all sorts of extravagant things so that he might see the pain effaced from the boy’s face and hear him laugh happily.
That was why on the evening of Toby’s retrial, Big Joe left the shanty of the Minnie M. Baxter in awkward haste. He had left Skippy smiling a smile so poignant that he could bear it no longer.
“Big Joe,” the boy said when they were dawdling over the most luxurious meal that Tully’s money could buy, “it was most like throwin’ money away, huh? They don’t wanta let Pop get out, I guess. They can’t find the man that really did it and they’ve gotta have somebody so I s’pose they think it might’s well be my Pop. Now he will be in for life on account of the way they tripped him up in his answers. Gee, how could he remember word for word what he said at his first trial? People don’t remember word for word ’bout things like that. Poor Pop was so nervous I got chills down my back.”
“Don’t ye be gettin’ down, kid,” Tully protested; “’tis not sayin’ we’re licked till they turn down an appeal. We got some more dough.”
“So much money,” said Skippy with a note of wonder in his high-pitched voice. “Gee, Big Joe, you’ve spent so much on Pop an’ me already. Now you wanta spend the last you got! Gee whiz, I can’t let you—I can’t! Much as I wanta see Pop free. It ain’t fair lettin’ you spend all your hard-earned money....”
Tully had long since learned that he could not lie to Skippy.