“Oh, a couple of thousand, just to play safe. And I'll have to leave you a batch of bills to settle for me.”
“All right, son, I'll settle them. Here's your two thousand. You can pay me back out of your winnings on the voyage. And never mind about your note or the assignment of an interest in your inheritance. If I cannot take my own son's word of honor I don't deserve a son. Just take care of yourself, Joey, because if anything should happen to you it would go rather hard with your old man.”
He wrote Joey a check for two thousand dollars and took an affectionate farewell of his son.
“Now listen to me, my dear young Hotspur,” Cappy Ricks commanded him as he shook Joey's hand in farewell. “The schooner's name is Tyee and you'll find her at the Ricks Lumber & Logging Company's mill dock in Aberdeen, on Gray's Harbor, Washington. And don't be afraid of her. She was built to weather anything. The skipper's name is Mike Murphy, and if you can't get along with Mike and learn to love him before you're in the ship a week, there's something wrong with you, Joey. Just don't start anything with Mike though, because he always finishes strong, and whatever he does is always right—with me. When you get out there he'll show you the orders I will have telegraphed him and you have my word of honor, boy, that there'll be no double-crossing and no interference unless you request it.”
“Right-o!” cried Joey, and was off to earn twenty-five thousand dollars of the easiest money he had ever heard of.
“Like spearing a fish in a bathtub,” murmured Cappy Ricks dreamily, and tore up the fifty-thousand-dollar check he had just written. “Joe, if your boy is such easy game for a pair of old duffers like us, just think what soft picking he must have been for that nimble-footed lady with the raven hair, the pearly teeth and the eyes that won't behave!”
“But she's coarse and brainless, Alden. I can't imagine a boy like my Joey falling in love with a woman like that. He ought to know better. Just remember how he was raised.”
“Fooey! Joey isn't in love. He only thinks he is, and the reason he thinks it is because she has told him so a hundred times. Can't you just see her looking up at Joey with her startled-fawn eyes and saying: 'Oh, you do love me, don't you, Joey?' As if the fact that Joey loved her constituted the eighth wonder of the world! And she's probably told Joey she'll die if he ever ceases to love her; and he's kind and obliging and wouldn't hurt a fly if he could avoid it. Why, Joe, you old idiot, you mustn't feel that Joey has disgraced himself. Isn't he planning to marry the woman? Only a decent man—a born idealist—could hold that designing woman in such reverence. Blamed if it isn't kind of sweet of the boy, although I would love to give him a kick that would jar all his relations—including his father!”
Old Joe Gurney gazed at Cappy in admiration.
“Alden,” he declared, “you have a singularly acute knowledge of women.”