I recovered myself then, believing he was only trying to fret me. “You needn’t talk nonsense,” I said. “If you mean to say that my father made way with himself, why you’re simply silly! Everybody knows that he was drowned while fishing, over there off White Rock.”
“So everybody knows it, hey?” he responded, with a most exasperating air of knowing something that I didn’t know. “All right. I’m glad that folks know so much. But let me tell you, Clint Webb, that you and your ma’d be paupers now if he hadn’t got drowned as he did. It was the only thing he could do.”
“You’d better drop it,” I advised him, scornfully. “You’d much better be thinking of what will happen to you because of this evening’s work. You can’t bother me by any such silly talk.”
“Oh, I can’t hey?” he snarled in a tone that, defenceless as he was, tempted me to kick him.
But just then the sail of the sloop began to fill. I ran to the tiller and brought her head around. A little breeze had sprung up and the Wavecrest was under good way again. In a few moments we passed the light at the entrance to the harbor, and tacked for our anchorage. My mother’s property did not include shore rights, so we had no private landing at which to tie the sloop, but moored her at a buoy in the quiet cove near the ferry dock.
“What do you mean to do with me?” asked Paul, having been mighty quiet for the last few minutes.
“I’m going to march you up to the house and hand you over to your father. And if I have any influence with mother at all, both you and he will pack your dunnage and leave in the morning.”
He fell silent again until I had dropped the sail and picked up our float. When the Wavecrest was fast he asked more meekly:
“Aren’t you going to take this cord off my wrist?”
“No. You’re going up to the house in just that fix.”