“Yes, you can,” the older man’s face became doleful. “You ain’t the kind to let that-there superstition bug bite you.”
“No,” admitted his pupil. “I think superstition is just believing something somebody else tells you until you are so busy watching out for something to go wrong that you aren’t ‘right on the job’ with your own work—or you are so busy waiting for some good thing to ‘happen’ that you don’t see Opportunity when it comes up because you’re not watching Opportunity—you’re watching Luck, or Omens.”
“Don’t I know it!” Jeff was rueful. “I want to kick myself sometimes—but when you know other folks has had their crates ‘jinxed’ by being in the same hangar with one that has got the name for being hoodooed—what would you do?”
“Just what I’m doing now,” Larry grinned. “I know Mr. Everdail paid the company for the ruined seaplane and moved it into the hangar, here. I know your airplane almost touches it, every night. But I don’t let that worry me, because——”
“Well, it worries me. I try not to let it, but the worry is there, no matter what I do. You see, I never thought, out in the marsh, about anything going wrong because I took that big wrench and put it in my tool kit after we salvaged it out of the water. But I dreamt about emeralds, last night, and so I went to a fortune teller gypsy woman and she told me a dream like that meant bad luck in business, and so I said I was a pilot and told her all about the seaplane——”
“You ought to be careful,” Larry interrupted. “If she puts two-and-two together, emeralds and a chase and a wrecked seaplane——”
“Oh, she was too busy talking to listen that close.”
“They’re awfully quick—the way they guess what’s in your mind proves that.”
“Oh, she won’t think anything about it. Anyhow, she told me not on any chance to touch that cracked up seaplane or anything that ever was on it—and so—I put the jinx on my own crate without meaning to.”
“I’m still willing to learn in it.”