The Little Lady of the Big House

And when Tim Hagan, with straight left for the hundredth time to bleeding nose and mangled mouth, and with ever reiterant right hook to stomach, had him dazed and reeling, the breath whistling and sobbing through his lacerated lips – was no time for succor from palaces and bank accounts. On his two legs, with his two fists, it was either he or Tim. And it was right there, in sweat and blood and iron of soul, that Young Dick learned how not to lose a losing fight. It had been uphill from the first blow, but he stuck it out until in the end it was agreed that neither could best the other, although this agreement was not reached until they had first lain on the ground in nausea and exhaustion and with streaming eyes wept their rage and defiance at each other. After that, they became chums and between them ruled the schoolyard.

Lucky Richard died the same month Young Dick emerged from grammar school. Young Dick was thirteen years old, with twenty million dollars, and without a relative in the world to trouble him. He was the master of a palace of servants, a steam yacht, stables, and, as well, of a summer palace down the Peninsula in the nabob colony at Menlo. One thing, only, was he burdened with: guardians.

On a summer afternoon, in the big library, he attended the first session of his board of guardians. There were three of them, all elderly, and successful, all legal, all business comrades of his father. Dick’s impression, as they explained things to him, was that, although they meant well, he had no contacts with them. In his judgment, their boyhood was too far behind them. Besides that, it was patent that him, the particular boy they were so much concerned with, they did not understand at all. Furthermore, in his own sure way he decided that he was the one person in the world fitted to know what was best for himself.

Mr. Crockett made a long speech, to which Dick listened with alert and becoming attention, nodding his head whenever he was directly addressed or appealed to. Messrs. Davidson and Slocum also had their say and were treated with equal consideration. Among other things, Dick learned what a sterling, upright man his father had been, and the program already decided upon by the three gentlemen which would make him into a sterling and upright man.

When they were quite done, Dick took it upon himself to say a few things.

“I have thought it over,” he announced, “and first of all I shall go traveling.”

“That will come afterward, my boy,” Mr. Slocum explained soothingly. “When – say – when you are ready to enter the university. At that time a year abroad would be a very good thing… a very good thing indeed.”

“Of course,” Mr. Davidson volunteered quickly, having noted the annoyed light in the lad’s eyes and the unconscious firm-drawing and setting of the lips, “of course, in the meantime you could do some traveling, a limited amount of traveling, during your school vacations. I am sure my fellow guardians will agree – under the proper management and safeguarding, of course – that such bits of travel sandwiched between your school-terms, would be advisable and beneficial.”

“How much did you say I am worth?” Dick asked with apparent irrelevance.

“Twenty millions – at a most conservative estimate – that is about the sum,” Mr. Crockett answered promptly.

“Suppose I said right now that I wanted a hundred dollars!” Dick went on.

“Why – er – ahem.” Mr. Slocum looked about him for guidance.

“We would be compelled to ask what you wanted it for,” answered Mr. Crockett.

“And suppose,” Dick said very slowly, looking Mr. Crockett squarely in the eyes, “suppose I said that I was very sorry, but that I did not care to say what I wanted it for?”

“Then you wouldn’t get it,” Mr. Crockett said so immediately that there was a hint of testiness and snap in his manner.

Dick nodded slowly, as if letting the information sink in.

“But, of course, my boy,” Mr. Slocum took up hastily, “you understand you are too young to handle money yet. We must decide that for you.”

“You mean I can’t touch a penny without your permission?”

“Not a penny,” Mr. Crockett snapped.

Dick nodded his head thoughtfully and murmured, “Oh, I see.”

“Of course, and quite naturally, it would only be fair, you know, you will have a small allowance for your personal spending,” Mr. Davidson said. “Say, a dollar, or, perhaps, two dollars, a week. As you grow older this allowance will be increased. And by the time you are twenty-one, doubtlessly you will be fully qualified – with advice, of course – to handle your own affairs.”

“And until I am twenty-one my twenty million wouldn’t buy me a hundred dollars to do as I please with?” Dick queried very subduedly.

Mr. Davidson started to corroborate in soothing phrases, but was waved to silence by Dick, who continued:

“As I understand it, whatever money I handle will be by agreement between the four of us?”

The Board of Guardians nodded.

“That is, whatever we agree, goes?”

Again the Board of Guardians nodded.

“Well, I’d like to have a hundred right now,” Dick announced.

“What for?” Mr. Crockett demanded.

“I don’t mind telling you,” was the lad’s steady answer. “To go traveling.”

“You’ll go to bed at eight: thirty this evening,” Mr. Crockett retorted. “And you don’t get any hundred. The lady we spoke to you about will be here before six. She is to have, as we explained, daily and hourly charge of you. At six-thirty, as usual, you will dine, and she will dine with you and see you to bed. As we told you, she will have to serve the place of a mother to you – see that your ears are clean, your neck washed – ”

“And that I get my Saturday night bath,” Dick amplified meekly for him.

“Precisely.”

“How much are you – am I – paying the lady for her services?” Dick questioned in the disconcerting, tangential way that was already habitual to him, as his school companions and teachers had learned to their cost.

Mr. Crockett for the first time cleared his throat for pause.

“I’m paying her, ain’t I?” Dick prodded. “Out of the twenty million, you know.”

“The spit of his father,” said Mr. Slocum in an aside.

“Mrs. Summerstone, the lady as you elect to call her, receives one hundred and fifty a month, eighteen hundred a year in round sum,” said Mr. Crockett.

“It’s a waste of perfectly good money,” Dick sighed. “And board and lodging thrown in!”

He stood up – not the born aristocrat of the generations, but the reared aristocrat of thirteen years in the Nob Hill palace. He stood up with such a manner that his Board of Guardians left their leather chairs to stand up with him. But he stood up as no Lord Fauntleroy ever stood up; for he was a mixer. He had knowledge that human life was many-faced and many-placed. Not for nothing had he been spelled down by Mona Sanguinetti. Not for nothing had he fought Tim Hagan to a standstill and, co-equal, ruled the schoolyard roost with him.

He was birthed of the wild gold-adventure of Forty-nine. He was a reared aristocrat and a grammar-school-trained democrat. He knew, in his precocious immature way, the differentiations between caste and mass; and, behind it all, he was possessed of a will of his own and of a quiet surety of self that was incomprehensible to the three elderly gentlemen who had been given charge of his and his destiny and who had pledged themselves to increase his twenty millions and make a man of him in their own composite image.

“Thank you for your kindness,” Young Dick said generally to the three. “I guess we’ll get along all right. Of course, that twenty millions is mine, and of course you’ve got to take care of it for me, seeing I know nothing of business – ”

“And we’ll increase it for you, my boy, we’ll increase it for you in safe, conservative ways,” Mr. Slocum assured him.

“No speculation,” Young Dick warned. “Dad’s just been lucky – I’ve heard him say that times have changed and a fellow can’t take the chances everybody used to take.”

From which, and from much which has already passed, it might erroneously be inferred that Young Dick was a mean and money-grubbing soul. On the contrary, he was at that instant entertaining secret thoughts and plans so utterly regardless and disdainful of his twenty millions as to place him on a par with a drunken sailor sowing the beach with a three years’ pay-day.

“I am only a boy,” Young Dick went on. “But you don’t know me very well yet. We’ll get better acquainted by and by, and, again thanking you…”

He paused, bowed briefly and grandly as lords in Nob Hill palaces early learn to bow, and, by the quality of the pause, signified that the audience was over. Nor did the impact of dismissal miss his guardians. They, who had been co-lords with his father, withdrew confused and perplexed. Messrs. Davidson and Slocum were on the point of resolving their perplexity into wrath, as they went down the great stone stairway to the waiting carriage, but Mr. Crockett, the testy and snappish, muttered ecstatically: “The son of a gun! The little son of a gun!”

The carriage carried them down to the old Pacific Union Club, where, for another hour, they gravely discussed the future of Young Dick Forrest and pledged themselves anew to the faith reposed in them by Lucky Richard Forrest. And down the hill, on foot, where grass grew on the paved streets too steep for horse-traffic, Young Dick hurried. As the height of land was left behind, almost immediately the palaces and spacious grounds of the nabobs gave way to the mean streets and wooden warrens of the working people. The San Francisco of 1887 as incontinently intermingled its slums and mansions as did the old cities of Europe. Nob Hill arose, like any medieval castle, from the mess and ruck of common life that denned and laired at its base.

Young Dick came to pause alongside a corner grocery, the second story of which was rented to Timothy Hagan Senior, who, by virtue of being a policeman with a wage of a hundred dollars a month, rented this high place to dwell above his fellows who supported families on no more than forty and fifty dollars a month.

In vain Young Dick whistled up through the unscreened, open windows. Tim Hagan Junior was not at home. But Young Dick wasted little wind in the whistling. He was debating on possible adjacent places where Tim Hagan might be, when Tim himself appeared around the corner, bearing a lidless lard-can that foamed with steam beer. He grunted greeting, and Young Dick grunted with equal roughness, just as if, a brief space before, he had not, in most lordly fashion, terminated an audience with three of the richest merchant-kings of an imperial city. Nor did his possession of twenty increasing millions hint the slightest betrayal in his voice or mitigate in the slightest the gruffness of his grunt.

“Ain’t seen yeh since yer old man died,” Tim Hagan commented.

“Well, you’re seein’ me now, ain’t you?” was Young Dick’s retort. “Say, Tim, I come to see you on business.”

“Wait till I rush the beer to the old man,” said Tim, inspecting the state of the foam in the lard-can with an experienced eye. “He’ll roar his head off if it comes in flat.”

“Oh, you can shake it up,” Young Dick assured him. “Only want to see you a minute. I’m hitting the road to-night. Want to come along?”

Tim’s small, blue Irish eyes flashed with interest.

“Where to?” he queried.

“Don’t know. Want to come? If you do, we can talk it over after we start? You know the ropes. What d’ye say?”

“The old man’ll beat the stuffin’ outa me,” Tim demurred.

“He’s done that before, an’ you don’t seem to be much missing,” Young Dick callously rejoined. “Say the word, an’ we’ll meet at the Ferry Building at nine to-night. What d’ye say? I’ll be there.”

“Supposin’ I don’t show up?” Tim asked.

“I’ll be on my way just the same.” Young Dick turned as if to depart, paused casually, and said over his shoulder, “Better come along.”

Tim shook up the beer as he answered with equal casualness, “Aw right.

I’ll be there.”

After parting from Tim Hagan Young Dick spent a busy hour or so looking up one, Marcovich, a Slavonian schoolmate whose father ran a chop-house in which was reputed to be served the finest twenty-cent meal in the city. Young Marcovich owed Young Dick two dollars, and Young Dick accepted the payment of a dollar and forty cents as full quittance of the debt.

Also, with shyness and perturbation, Young Dick wandered down Montgomery Street and vacillated among the many pawnshops that graced that thoroughfare. At last, diving desperately into one, he managed to exchange for eight dollars and a ticket his gold watch that he knew was worth fifty at the very least.

Dinner in the Nob Hill palace was served at six-thirty. He arrived at six-forty-five and encountered Mrs. Summerstone. She was a stout, elderly, decayed gentlewoman, a daughter of the great Porter-Rickington family that had shaken the entire Pacific Coast with its financial crash in the middle seventies. Despite her stoutness, she suffered from what she called shattered nerves.

“This will never, never do, Richard,” she censured. “Here is dinner waiting fifteen minutes already, and you have not yet washed your face and hands.”

“I am sorry, Mrs. Summerstone,” Young Dick apologized. “I won’t keep you waiting ever again. And I won’t bother you much ever.”

At dinner, in state, the two of them alone in the great dining room, Young Dick strove to make things easy for the lady, whom, despite his knowledge that she was on his pay-roll, he felt toward as a host must feel toward a guest.

“You’ll be very comfortable here,” he promised, “once you are settled down. It’s a good old house, and most of the servants have been here for years.”

“But, Richard,” she smiled seriously to him; “it is not the servants who will determine my happiness here. It is you.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said graciously. “Better than that. I’m sorry I came in late for dinner. In years and years you’ll never see me late again. I won’t bother you at all. You’ll see. It will be just as though I wasn’t in the house.”

When he bade her good night, on his way to bed, he added, as a last thought:

“I’ll warn you of one thing: Ah Sing. He’s the cook. He’s been in our house for years and years – oh, I don’t know, maybe twenty-five or thirty years he’s cooked for father, from long before this house was built or I was born. He’s privileged. He’s so used to having his own way that you’ll have to handle him with gloves. But once he likes you he’ll work his fool head off to please you. He likes me that way. You get him to like you, and you’ll have the time of your life here. And, honest, I won’t give you any trouble at all. It’ll be a regular snap, just as if I wasn’t here at all.”

Chapter V

At nine in the evening, sharp to the second, clad in his oldest clothes, Young Dick met Tim Hagan at the Ferry Building.

“No use headin’ north,” said Tim. “Winter’ll come on up that way and make the sleepin’ crimpy. D’ye want to go East – that means Nevada and the deserts.”

“Any other way?” queried Young Dick. “What’s the matter with south? We can head for Los Angeles, an’ Arizona, an’ New Mexico – oh, an’ Texas.”

“How much money you got?” Tim demanded.

“What for?” Young Dick countered.

“We gotta get out quick, an’ payin’ our way at the start is quickest. Me – I’m all hunkydory; but you ain’t. The folks that’s lookin’ after you’ll raise a roar. They’ll have more detectives out than you can shake at stick at. We gotta dodge ’em, that’s what.”

“Then we will dodge,” said Young Dick. “We’ll make short jumps this way and that for a couple of days, layin’ low most of the time, paying our way, until we can get to Tracy. Then we’ll quit payin’ an’ beat her south.”

All of which program was carefully carried out. They eventually went through Tracy as pay passengers, six hours after the local deputy sheriff had given up his task of searching the trains. With an excess of precaution Young Dick paid beyond Tracy and as far as Modesto. After that, under the teaching of Tim, he traveled without paying, riding blind baggage, box cars, and cow-catchers. Young Dick bought the newspapers, and frightened Tim by reading to him the lurid accounts of the kidnapping of the young heir to the Forrest millions.

Back in San Francisco the Board of Guardians offered rewards that totaled thirty thousand dollars for the recovery of their ward. And Tim Hagan, reading the same while they lay in the grass by some water-tank, branded forever the mind of Young Dick with the fact that honor beyond price was a matter of neither place nor caste and might outcrop in the palace on the height of land or in the dwelling over a grocery down on the flat.

“Gee!” Tim said to the general landscape. “The old man wouldn’t raise a roar if I snitched on you for that thirty thousand. It makes me scared to think of it.”

And from the fact that Tim thus openly mentioned the matter, Young Dick concluded that there was no possibility of the policeman’s son betraying him.

Not until six weeks afterward, in Arizona, did Young Dick bring up the subject.

“You see, Tim,” he said, “I’ve got slathers of money. It’s growing all the time, and I ain’t spending a cent of it, not so as you can notice… though that Mrs. Summerstone is getting a cold eighteen hundred a year out of me, with board and carriages thrown in, while you an’ I are glad to get the leavings of firemen’s pails in the round-houses. Just the same, my money’s growing. What’s ten per cent, on twenty dollars?”

Tim Hagan stared at the shimmering heat-waves of the desert and tried to solve the problem.

“What’s one-tenth of twenty million?” Young Dick demanded irritably.

“Huh! – two million, of course.”

“Well, five per cent’s half of ten per cent. What does twenty million earn at five per cent, for one year?”

Tim hesitated.

“Half of it, half of two million!” Young Dick cried. “At that rate I’m a million richer every year. Get that, and hang on to it, and listen to me. When I’m good and willing to go back – but not for years an’ years – we’ll fix it up, you and I. When I say the word, you’ll write to your father. He’ll jump out to where we are waiting, pick me up, and cart me back. Then he’ll collect the thirty thousand reward from my guardians, quit the police force, and most likely start a saloon.”

“Thirty thousand’s a hell of a lot of money,” was Tim’s nonchalant way of expressing his gratitude.

“Not to me,” Young Dick minimized his generosity. “Thirty thousand goes into a million thirty-three times, and a million’s only a year’s turnover of my money.”

But Tim Hagan never lived to see his father a saloon keeper. Two days later, on a trestle, the lads were fired out of an empty box-car by a brake-man who should have known better. The trestle spanned a dry ravine. Young Dick looked down at the rocks seventy feet below and demurred.

“There’s room on the trestle,” he said; “but what if the train starts up?”

“It ain’t goin’ to start – beat it while you got time,” the brakeman insisted. “The engine’s takin’ water at the other side. She always takes it here.”

But for once the engine did not take water. The evidence at the inquest developed that the engineer had found no water in the tank and started on. Scarcely had the two boys dropped from the side-door of the box-car, and before they had made a score of steps along the narrow way between the train and the abyss, than the train began to move. Young Dick, quick and sure in all his perceptions and adjustments, dropped on the instant to hands and knees on the trestle. This gave him better holding and more space, because he crouched beneath the overhang of the box-cars. Tim, not so quick in perceiving and adjusting, also overcome with Celtic rage at the brakeman, instead of dropping to hands and knees, remained upright to flare his opinion of the brakeman, to the brakeman, in lurid and ancestral terms.

“Get down! – drop!” Young Dick shouted.

But the opportunity had passed. On a down grade, the engine picked up the train rapidly. Facing the moving cars, with empty air at his back and the depth beneath, Tim tried to drop on hands and knees. But the first twist of his shoulders brought him in contact with the car and nearly out-balanced him. By a miracle he recovered equilibrium. But he stood upright. The train was moving faster and faster. It was impossible to get down.

Young Dick, kneeling and holding, watched. The train gathered way. The cars moved more swiftly. Tim, with a cool head, his back to the fall, his face to the passing cars, his arms by his sides, with nowhere save under his feet a holding point, balanced and swayed. The faster the train moved, the wider he swayed, until, exerting his will, he controlled himself and ceased from swaying.

And all would have been well with him, had it not been for one car. Young Dick knew it, and saw it coming. It was a “palace horse-car,” projecting six inches wider than any car on the train. He saw Tim see it coming. He saw Tim steel himself to meet the abrupt subtraction of half a foot from the narrow space wherein he balanced. He saw Tim slowly and deliberately sway out, sway out to the extremest limit, and yet not sway out far enough. The thing was physically inevitable. An inch more, and Tim would have escaped the car. An inch more and he would have fallen without impact from the car. It caught him, in that margin of an inch, and hurled him backward and side-twisting. Twice he whirled sidewise, and two and a half times he turned over, ere he struck on his head and neck on the rocks.

He never moved after he struck. The seventy-foot fall broke his neck and crushed his skull. And right there Young Dick learned death – not the ordered, decent death of civilization, wherein doctors and nurses and hypodermics ease the stricken one into the darkness, and ceremony and function and flowers and undertaking institutions conspire to give a happy leave-taking and send-off to the departing shade, but sudden death, primitive death, ugly and ungarnished, like the death of a steer in the shambles or a fat swine stuck in the jugular.

And right there Young Dick learned more – the mischance of life and fate; the universe hostile to man; the need to perceive and to act, to see and know, to be sure and quick, to adjust instantly to all instant shiftage of the balance of forces that bear upon the living. And right there, beside the strangely crumpled and shrunken remnant of what had been his comrade the moment before, Young Dick learned that illusion must be discounted, and that reality never lied.

In New Mexico, Young Dick drifted into the Jingle-bob Ranch, north of Roswell, in the Pecos Valley. He was not yet fourteen, and he was accepted as the mascot of the ranch and made into a “sure-enough” cowboy by cowboys who, on legal papers, legally signed names such as Wild Horse, Willie Buck, Boomer Deacon, and High Pockets.

Here, during a stay of six months, Young Dick, soft of frame and unbreakable, achieved a knowledge of horses and horsemanship, and of men in the rough and raw, that became a life asset. More he learned. There was John Chisum, owner of the Jingle-bob, the Bosque Grande, and of other cattle ranches as far away as the Black River and beyond. John Chisum was a cattle king who had foreseen the coming of the farmer and adjusted from the open range to barbed wire, and who, in order to do so, had purchased every forty acres carrying water and got for nothing the use of the millions of acres of adjacent range that was worthless without the water he controlled. And in the talk by the camp-fire and chuck wagon, among forty-dollar-a-month cowboys who had not foreseen what John Chisum foresaw, Young Dick learned precisely why and how John Chisum had become a cattle king while a thousand of his contemporaries worked for him on wages.

But Young Dick was no cool-head. His blood was hot. He had passion, and fire, and male pride. Ready to cry from twenty hours in the saddle, he learned to ignore the thousand aching creaks in his body and with the stoic brag of silence to withstrain from his blankets until the hard-bitten punchers led the way. By the same token he straddled the horse that was apportioned him, insisted on riding night-herd, and knew no hint of uncertainty when it came to him to turn the flank of a stampede with a flying slicker. He could take a chance. It was his joy to take a chance. But at such times he never failed of due respect for reality. He was well aware that men were soft-shelled and cracked easily on hard rocks or under pounding hoofs. And when he rejected a mount that tangled its legs in quick action and stumbled, it was not because he feared to be cracked, but because, when he took a chance on being cracked, he wanted, as he told John Chisum himself, “an even break for his money.”

It was while at the Jingle-bob, but mailed by a cattleman from Chicago, that Young Dick wrote a letter to his guardians. Even then, so careful was he, that the envelope was addressed to Ah Sing. Though unburdened by his twenty millions, Young Dick never forgot them, and, fearing his estate might be distributed among remote relatives who might possibly inhabit New England, he warned his guardians that he was still alive and that he would return home in several years. Also, he ordered them to keep Mrs. Summerstone on at her regular salary.

But Young Dick’s feet itched. Half a year, he felt, was really more than he should have spent at the Jingle-bob. As a boy hobo, or road-kid, he drifted on across the United States, getting acquainted with its peace officers, police judges, vagrancy laws, and jails. And he learned vagrants themselves at first hand, and floating laborers and petty criminals. Among other things, he got acquainted with farms and farmers, and, in New York State, once picked berries for a week with a Dutch farmer who was experimenting with one of the first silos erected in the United States. Nothing of what he learned came to him in the spirit of research. He had merely the human boy’s curiosity about all things, and he gained merely a huge mass of data concerning human nature and social conditions that was to stand him in good stead in later years, when, with the aid of the books, he digested and classified it.

His adventures did not harm him. Even when he consorted with jail-birds in jungle camps, and listened to their codes of conduct and measurements of life, he was not affected. He was a traveler, and they were alien breeds. Secure in the knowledge of his twenty millions, there was neither need nor temptation for him to steal or rob. All things and all places interested him, but he never found a place nor a situation that could hold him. He wanted to see, to see more and more, and to go on seeing.

At the end of three years, nearly sixteen, hard of body, weighing a hundred and thirty pounds, he judged it time to go home and open the books. So he took his first long voyage, signing on as boy on a windjammer bound around the Horn from the Delaware Breakwater to San Francisco. It was a hard voyage, of one hundred and eighty days, but at the end he weighed ten pounds the more for having made it.

Mrs. Summerstone screamed when he walked in on her, and Ah Sing had to be called from the kitchen to identify him. Mrs. Summerstone screamed a second time. It was when she shook hands with him and lacerated her tender skin in the fisty grip of his rope-calloused palms.

He was shy, almost embarrassed, as he greeted his guardians at the hastily summoned meeting. But this did not prevent him from talking straight to the point.

“It’s this way,” he said. “I am not a fool. I know what I want, and I want what I want. I am alone in the world, outside of good friends like you, of course, and I have my own ideas of the world and what I want to do in it. I didn’t come home because of a sense of duty to anybody here. I came home because it was time, because of my sense of duty to myself. I’m all the better from my three years of wandering about, and now it’s up to me to go on with my education – my book education, I mean.”

“The Belmont Academy,” Mr. Slocum suggested. “That will fit you for the university – ”

Dick shook his head decidedly.

“And take three years to do it. So would a high school. I intend to be in the University of California inside one year. That means work. But my mind’s like acid. It’ll bite into the books. I shall hire a coach, or half a dozen of them, and go to it. And I’ll hire my coaches myself – hire and fire them. And that means money to handle.”

“A hundred a month,” Mr. Crockett suggested.

Dick shook his head.

“I’ve taken care of myself for three years without any of my money. I guess. I can take care of myself along with some of my money here in San Francisco. I don’t care to handle my business affairs yet, but I do want a bank account, a respectable-sized one. I want to spend it as I see fit, for what I see fit.”

The guardians looked their dismay at one another.

“It’s ridiculous, impossible,” Mr. Crockett began. “You are as unreasonable as you were before you went away.”

“It’s my way, I guess,” Dick sighed. “The other disagreement was over my money. It was a hundred dollars I wanted then.”

“Think of our position, Dick,” Mr. Davidson urged. “As your guardians, how would it be looked upon if we gave you, a lad of sixteen, a free hand with money.”

“What’s the Freda worth, right now?” Dick demanded irrelevantly.

“Can sell for twenty thousand any time,” Mr. Crockett answered.

“Then sell her. She’s too large for me, and she’s worth less every year. I want a thirty-footer that I can handle myself for knocking around the Bay, and that won’t cost a thousand. Sell the Freda and put the money to my account. Now what you three are afraid of is that I’ll misspend my money – taking to drinking, horse-racing, and running around with chorus girls. Here’s my proposition to make you easy on that: let it be a drawing account for the four of us. The moment any of you decide I am misspending, that moment you can draw out the total balance. I may as well tell you, that just as a side line I’m going to get a business college expert to come here and cram me with the mechanical side of the business game.”