II.
“If Cap’n Saunders ain’t here,” said Ed Davis, “we’ll get another boat?”
Clem nodded. Together they were walking up a side street of San Pedro to the little cottage where Captain Ezra Saunders, a retired veteran of many seas and seasons, was living on the income furnished him by two or three fishing boats, which were run by his son Tom, a young fellow a year or two older than Clem.
As they turned in at the gate of the vine-shaded cottage, however, they knew that the captain was at home from the foghorn voice which bellowed forth:
“Howdy, Clem!”
Ezra Saunders was a remarkable old man—though he was scarce sixty years of age. He was crippled by rheumatism, and had lost a leg at the knee from a shark bite, while his right arm had been paralyzed on his last voyage—when he had brought the schooner Mary Connors through a thousand miles of typhoon and had saved the lives of twenty men.
With all this, however, Clem had never seen the old man in gloomy mood. Ever was Captain Saunders smiling, optimistic, cheerful. As he and Ed Davis shook hands, and stepped up to the porch, where easy-chairs awaited them, the skipper bellowed to his wife, and Mrs. Saunders also came forth, to fold each of the visitors in a warm embrace.
“Well, well!” she exclaimed, wiping a tear from her ruddy cheeks. “Clem, if you ain’t become a real city man! Say! Wouldn’t your mother ha’ been proud of you now!”
“I hope so,” and Clem’s brown eyes saddened a trifle. Since his mother’s death Mrs. Saunders had been the only mother he had known—and that had been twelve summers past. Then he looked up, with his old cheerful smile. “I do believe you’re getting thin!”
“Nonsense, you vagabond!” Mrs. Saunders, who weighed two hundred, and knew it, laughed through her welcoming tears. “Don’t you flatter me, now! You boys ain’t goin’ to run right off, I hope? I been makin’ pies to-day, and it seems to me you two rapscallions used to like Ma Saunders’ pies right well before you got stuck up an’ citified.”