mooring-buoy.
“They’re having what stands them for a good time. I can give you that, and twice as much as that, Harve. How’d you like it?”
“Caesar! That’s no way to get a dinghy overside,” said Harvey, still intent on the yacht. “If I couldn’t slip a tackle better than that I’d stay ashore. … What if I don’t?”
“Stay ashore—or what?”
“Yacht and ranch and live on ‘the old man,’ and—get behind Mama where there’s trouble,” said Harvey, with a twinkle in his eye.
“Why, in that case, you come right in with me, my son.”
“Ten dollars a month?” Another twinkle.
“Not a cent more until you’re worth it, and you won’t begin to touch that for a few years.”
“I’d sooner begin sweeping out the office—isn’t that how the big bugs start?—and touch something now than—”
“I know it; we all feel that way. But I guess we can hire any sweeping we need. I made the same mistake myself of starting in too soon.”
“Thirty million dollars’ worth o’ mistake, wasn’t it? I’d risk it for that.”
“I lost some; and I gained some. I’ll tell you.”
Cheyne pulled his beard and smiled as he looked over the still water, and spoke away from Harvey, who presently began to be aware that his father was telling the story of his life. He talked in a low, even voice, without gesture and without expression; and it was a history for which a dozen leading journals would cheerfully have paid many dollars—the story of