“My dear boy, sit down!” exclaimed Mr. Pepper, motioning Brandon to a chair. “Sit down and let me look at you.”
He himself took a chair at a desk by the window and studied the boy intently for several moments. Meanwhile Brandon was making a mental examination of the shipping merchant as well.
Adoniram Pepper was a little, rotund man with a good deal of color in his face and very little hair on his head. His mouth was always smiling, but at times, as Brandon had already seen, the gray eves could be very stern indeed behind the gold rimmed glasses, which latter had such hard work remaining upon Mr. Pepper’s squat nose.
“Yes, sir, you are the perfect picture of your father,” declared the shipping merchant at last. “I thought when I read of his death that we should never see his like again; but you have the promise of all his outward characteristics, at least. I hope you’ve his inner ones, too.”
“I hope so,” replied Brandon, pleased indeed at such praise of his father.
“He was a good man,” continued Mr. Pepper ruminatively. “By the way, what’s your name?”
“Brandon, sir.”
“Oh yes, I remember now. Your father talked to me of you. He wanted you to follow the sea, too, and I suppose that is what you’ve come down here to New York for, eh?”
“Yes, I hope to go to sea,” responded Brandon slowly.
Had he not remembered his experience with Caleb Wetherbee, without doubt Brandon would have opened his heart to the eccentric merchant and told him all; but bearing in mind the (to him) evident treachery of the mate of the Silver Swan, he was not ready to take into his confidence every friend of his father who happened to turn up.