“Did he wear the scalp at his belt?” she inquired.
Mermaid appearing, they all sat down and had a hot supper after which Cap’n Smiley and Mermaid played checkers and Keturah walked about with a yardstick in an effort to decide where she would have three shelves put up. She had a passion for shelves and drawers.
“What are these shelves to be for, Miss Smiley?” asked Mermaid, looking up from the board after she had beat her Dad for the third time.
“Medicine, most like,” Keturah, told her.
“Why not for our books?” Mermaid suggested.
“Bottles break,” said Keturah, concisely. “Do you prefer books to medicine? Not when you’re sick, I’ll warrant!”
“Yes, I do,” Mermaid insisted, and then she explained to her antagonist with a smile:
“You see, Dad, it’s because--it’s because books can make you happy while you’re dying, but medicine can only make you miserable while you’re getting well!”
Keturah gave the girl a look in which a skilled observer might have detected something resembling admiration.
“What an upside-down mind you have, child!” she said. “But then,” she allowed, “you use it and do your own thinking!”
“I wish she’d do some of my thinking,” exclaimed Cap’n Smiley, looking ruefully at the checkerboard. “Appears to me as if I had been out-thunk again!” He liked the defeated, “ker-plunk” sound of this past participle of his invention, and always used it to describe Mermaid’s victories.
Mermaid got up, went to the pantry, came back with a pan of sugared crullers, offered her Dad one, took one herself, put up the pan, and then cuddled contentedly against his arm. “I made them myself,” she murmured.
Her Dad stroked her hair. It was remarkably like the colour his own had been before thirty years of beach sunshine--and other things--had bleached the colour out of it.
“What are you going to be when you grow up, Mermaid?” he asked, dreamily.
“I shall try to make you a good home and keep you happy,” she assured him. “I’m knitting the slippers you’ll wear, now.”
They hugged each other in anticipation of their peaceful old age together, and went to bed.
Sometimes it isn’t what you don’t know about people but what you do know that makes them mysterious, as Mermaid once said.
She did not say it respecting the senior Dick Hand but she might well have done so. Richard Hand First was not only his proper designation but his motto, his war-cry, his watchword, and his slogan. Richard Hand first and everybody else nowhere, just about summed up the golden rule in Blue Port. Richard made the rule and Blue Port lived up to it.