“How she must love that old dad of hers!” Blackie whispered once. Johnny’s only answer was a scowl.
Yes, Johnny was shunned and slighted by this youthful “queen of the canneries,” as she had once been called, but the Stormy Petrel’s engineer, old Hugh MacGregor, came in for more than his full share of interest.
Hugh MacGregor was truly old. His thatch of gray told that. With grandchildren of his own he was just a big-hearted old man. Rusty was not long in sensing that.
When the dinner, a truly grand feast, was over, the others, Blackie, Red McGee, Lawrence and Johnny retired to the glassed-in porch where they might have a look at the barren hills of Alaska and the wide, foam-flecked sweep of Bristol Bay, and, at the same time, talk of fish, Oriental raiders and the sea.
MacGregor remained behind to “help with the dishes.”
“Do you like Alaska?” Rusty asked him.
“Oh, sure I do!” was the old man’s quick response. “I spent a winter much further north than this many years ago. I was quite young then. It was thrilling, truly it was. Cape Prince of Wales on Bering Straits—” his voice trailed off dreamily.
“Way up there?” the girl exclaimed. “What were you doing?”
“Herdin’ reindeer and Eskimo,” he laughed. “I crossed the straits in a skin boat with the Eskimo and lived a while in Russia without a passport. You do things like that when you are young.
“Ah yes,” he sighed, “youth is impulsive, and often wrong.” He was thinking of Johnny. He knew how Johnny felt about things. He had become very fond of the boy.