ANOTHER GLIMPSE OF THE GOODFELLOW

To Tom poor old Caleb seemed like a last, faint echo of the upheaval which had changed the face of nature and spelled sorrow in so many lives. He was like a floating timber tossed by the wind and sea, the last stray memento of some ship long since swallowed up in angry waves.

Tom was resolved old Caleb should not know that the offer of a reward for his grandson’s capture was still open. He had hated but he had not killed nor sanctioned killing. Tom had no doubt now of the grandson’s guilt but his better knowledge of the whole affair only strengthened his sympathy and liking for the little old man.

“Poor old codger,” Brent mused as they started back. “I never knew his past history. I suppose a lot of folks lost their homes when the land was cleared for the reservoir.”

“They were paid for them,” said Tom. “I guess a lot of them were glad to get the money.”

“You can’t pay a person for his home,” said Brent. “You can pay him for his house. Some of them tore their houses down, I heard, and carried them off and put them up again in the new village near the shore. That’s some idea, moving a village.

“Do you know,” he added, sprawling one of his legs against the windshield and the other outside the car, “I believe it’s a good idea for a village or a city to move; it gets into a rut sort of and needs a change. It’s bad to stay too long in one place. Now you take Brooklyn for instance, or Jersey City—”

“I often feel as if I’d like to get away and do something else for a while,” said Tom, taking a serious view of Brent’s talk. “I don’t mean give up my job at camp, of course, but just get off on a kind of a—you know.”

“Restless kind of—I know,” said Brent. “Be nice to get off in that boat, huh? The one you were shouting about? Just flop around. I suppose you could bang down south in a boat like that. Start about, oh say in October, and hit Palm Beach for the cold weather. I’d like to go down to Dixie so as to get away from the Dixie songs we have up here. There’s nothing like the water, Slady old boy. If I ever get rich I’m going to have a yacht.”

Tom mused, his thoughts returning fondly to the Goodfellow. “She’s some boat all right,” he said. “Hang it all, now you’ve got me thinking of it again.” Then, after a pause he said, “Like to take a little ride over to the Reservoir and pike around? It would only take an hour or so. I feel kind of restless to-day; I don’t want to go straight back. I’ll show you the boat, too, if you care to see it, when we get back to Catskill. It doesn’t cost anything to look at it,” he added wistfully.

“Anywhere you want to go, Tommy,” drawled Brent. “I’ll look at anything you want to show me.

“That’s very kind of you,” said Tom, glancing amusedly at his companion. Brent reclined in an ungainly posture of complacent ease with a: whimsically observant look on his face as if ready to be interested in anything and everything which did not require any physical exertion. It got on Tom’s nerves a little, but it amused him.

They drove through the clean, pleasant city of Kingston and over the bridge across the Esopus Creek and along the fine, smooth highway which parallels the Ulster and Delaware Railroad. A ride of half an hour or so brought them in sight of the vast, artificial lake which furnishes water to the distant metropolis.

“Pretty big drink of water, hey?” drawled Brent.

“They say it’s forty miles around it,” said Tom. “The dam is way over at the other end.”

They could not see the whole reservoir from the road, but they caught glimpses of it and could form an idea of its long, irregular extent.

Soon they came to the removed and rebuilt village of West Hurley near the shore of the reservoir. Close by, under the water as Tom knew, were the bones of the old dead village, traces of streets, odds and ends of demolished masonry, submerged memorials of the settlement which had once been there.

There was not much to the new village; it must have lost something in the process of removal and revival of the community life. Some of its simple buildings seemed comparatively new. The visitors looked in vain for any signs of actual reconstruction.

“Do you know,” mused Brent in his slow, dry way, “I don’t know why a reconstructed village shouldn’t be just as good as a new one—same as an automobile or a typewriter. I’d kind of like to get a squint under the water though. What do you suppose we’d see?”

“If we were here during a drought,” said Tom, “we’d see things on the sloping shore, that’s what Pop Dyker said.”

“Old village sort of pokes its nose up, hey?”

“Sort of like a ghost,” Tom said.

“Comes up for air,” said Brent. “Well, let’s move along. I guess the new village won’t get its feet wet, it seems to be well back.”

They drove along the road a little farther and up toward Woodstock, which is the habitat of a queer race of poets and artists, and so on in a northeasterly direction till they came to Saugerties and found themselves back on the road which borders the lordly Hudson.

At Catskill they paused for an inspection of the Goodfellow, Brent showing his usual amiable and whimsically passive interest at the prospect of acquaintance with this beauteous damsel of poor Tom’s heart.

Tom was disappointed to find that his friend, the caretaker, had gone away and was not expected to return till late in the autumn. No one seemed to have the boat in charge and Tom (lacking Hervey Willetts’ aggressive genius) was disinclined to venture upon that hallowed deck without permission. Nor was there a rowboat handy in which to circumnavigate the trim little cruiser and view it at close range.

So they contented themselves with a long distance inspection from the shore. The Goodfellow, in Tom’s view, seemed rather the worse for her long period at anchor. She looked neglected. Her white sides were dirty and there was, even from the distant shore, the appearance of neglect about her. She lay well clear of the area of navigation and was safely padlocked to her buoy as Tom could tell by her heavy mooring chain.

A boat is at home in the water and will not deteriorate riding at anchor. But just the same the sprightly Goodfellow seemed to be suffering from the fickleness and neglect of her wealthy young owner. The flag-pole was broken. The awning over the cockpit was torn and its loose shreds flapped in the breeze.

One thing in particular Tom noticed, which seemed quite at variance with the former spick and span appearance of the little cruiser. The port-holes seemed to be covered inside with some dusty looking material, which might have been torn from the ruined awning. Why the caretaker should have thought it desirable to put these makeshift shades in the unoccupied craft, Tom could not imagine. But on second thought it seemed not so surprising. It would confound the curiosity of strangers, boys especially, who might row out and try to peek into the sumptuous little cabin.

Another thing he noticed which he could not so easily explain. This was an area of sooty black at the top of the little smokestack from the galley. Probably it had been there before and he had never noticed it....

On the way to camp he said to Brent, “Seeing her neglected like that only makes me want her all the more.”

“You love her for herself alone,” said Brent in his droll way.

“I read in a book,” said Tom, “that if a fellow wants a thing and wants it bad enough and keeps on wanting it, in the end he’ll get it.”

“That isn’t what you read, Tommy,” said Brent. “You’re thinking of something that Stevenson said; ‘What a man wants, that thing he will get. Or he will be changed in the trying.’ That’s what you’re thinking of, Tommy. A man can have anything he wants if he’s willing to pay the price.”

“Well, I haven’t got the price,” said Tom soberly. He seemed quite simple and unsophisticated beside Brent.

“How do you know you haven’t?” Brent said.

“I know whether I’ve got two thousand dollars or not, don’t I?” Tom said sullenly.

“Yes, but how do you know two thousand dollars is the price?”

“Because the caretaker told me,” said Tom. “What are you trying to do, kid me? You can’t buy a thing if you haven’t got the price, can you? You get on my nerves.”

“I can have the gold trophy cup in the glass case in Administration Shack if I want to pay the price,” Brent drawled. “I can steal it.”

“And you’d go to jail.”

“Sure, that would be the price, Tommy,” said Brent.