Hallock Point without Frank Hallock, Kate did not think could be a home at all, and just there, Kate began to wonder why she could not go to boarding school quite as well as Frank. Certainly she was as old, and as for progress in school, she was far in advance of her brother. Besides, it would be, O, so nice, to think of it! Frank at General Russell’s, and she at school in New Haven, too. Frank would come and visit her in his gay uniform, and how proud she would be of her handsome brother, only Kate did hope he would not pinch or slap her before the other girls. And then Kate looked around her pretty room, with its adornments, each and every one with its little history of birthday gift, Christmas greeting, or token of love; and then suddenly she saw it all—her room without herself in it, Frank’s room vacant; no merry shout or sound of boyish presence—no Kate, even. Then it was that Kate thought, “No, it shall not be. Poor mamma! it would be too, too bad. I will not say one word about going to school,” and she went to sleep, at last, strong in the determination.
The next day the good news was announced to Frank in formal manner. His parents thought their son received the intelligence very quietly.
“But, my son,” said Mr. Hallock, “if you are to go to school in September, the weeks that lie between are not to be devoted exclusively to play. You are to fit yourself to enter certain classes in the school, and you are to have a master every day.”
“How pokey, to study in summer, papa!”
“But he will teach Kate, as well. If he takes the trouble to come here every day from the village, he may as well have two pupils as one.”
“And, papa,” suggested Kate, “why not three, as well as two? There is Harry, and you know how he has had to stay out of school with the plowing and the planting and the hoeing, and all sorts of things, and now he could get time just as well as not to run over for his lessons; and papa,” she added slyly, whispering the words in at his ear so that Frank might not hear, “Frank would have to study then, ’cause he would be ashamed to have Harry get ahead, a poor circus boy, you know!”
“No, Kate, I do not know; but we will see about Harry afterward.”
The master was from the village. Captain Green was his name. He had taught school for forty years in the winter, and been a pupil of the sea during the summer for a still longer period. The villagers used to say that every billow sweeping the Sound had felt the stroke of his oar. He was out on the bay at early morn, and the last ray of light found him urging on his little craft at night. He trapped lobsters, caught crabs, dug clams, sat for hours together holding the line over the edge of his boat that rocked idly on summer seas, in the hope of catching a black fish a little larger than any other fisherman had caught; and perfectly delighted to spend his nights in throwing out and drawing in the long seines, in the hope of the heaviest haul of bass or bluefish that ever came to shore. This was the master, Captain Green, who proposed to spend two hours every day at Hallock Point. He could run down the harbor to the Point, tie up his boat, and then, after lessons, go outside.
The villagers heard the news with unbelieving ears. “No power on earth,” they said, “could keep Captain Green on shore for two hours a day, so long as he could move an oar.” Nevertheless, Captain Green appeared prompt to the moment at the appointed hour.