“Gee! Is the boss in on this, too?”
“Not yet. I’m going to tell him now. Hush! There’s some one coming.”
Mr. Pett wandered in. He was still looking troubled.
“Oh, Ann–good morning, Mitchell–your aunt has decided to go to England. I want you to come, too.”
“You want me? To help interview Jimmy Crocker?”
“No, no. Just to come along and be company on the voyage. You’ll be such a help with Ogden, Ann. You can keep him in order. How you do it, I don’t know. You seem to make another boy of him.”
Ann stole a glance at Jerry, who answered with an encouraging grin. Ann was constrained to make her meaning plainer than by the language of the eye.
“Would you mind just running away for half a moment, Jerry?” she said winningly. “I want to say something to uncle Peter.”
“Sure. Sure.”
Ann turned to Mr. Pett as the door closed.
“You’d like somebody to make Ogden a different boy, wouldn’t you, uncle Peter?”
“I wish it was possible.”
“He’s been worrying you a lot lately, hasn’t he?” asked Ann sympathetically.
“Yes,” sighed Mr. Pett.
“Then that’s all right,” said Ann briskly. “I was afraid that you might not approve. But, if you do, I’ll go right ahead.”
Mr. Pett started violently. There was something in Ann’s voice and, as he looked at her, something in her face which made him fear the worst. Her eyes were flashing with an inspired light of a highly belligerent nature, and the sun turned the red hair to which she owed her deplorable want of balance to a mass of flame. There was something in the air. Mr. Pett sensed it with every nerve of his apprehensive person. He gazed at Ann, and as he did so the years seemed to slip from him and he was a boy again, about to be urged to lawless courses by the superior will of his boyhood’s hero, Hammond Chester. In the boyhood of nearly every man there is a single outstanding figure, some one youthful hypnotic Napoleon whose will was law and at whose bidding his better judgment curled up and died. In Mr. Pett’s life Ann’s father had filled this role. He had dominated Mr. Pett at an age when the mind is most malleable. And now–so true is it that though Time may blunt our boyish memories the traditions of boyhood live on in us and an emotional crisis will bring them to the surface as an explosion brings up the fish that lurk in the nethermost mud–it was as if he were facing the youthful Hammond Chester again and being irresistibly impelled to some course of which he entirely disapproved but which he knew that he was destined to undertake. He watched Ann as a trapped man might watch a ticking bomb, bracing himself for the explosion and knowing that he is helpless. She was Hammond Chester’s daughter, and she spoke to him with the voice of Hammond Chester. She was her father’s child and she was going to start something.
“I’ve arranged it all with Jerry,” said Ann. “He’s going to help me smuggle Ogden away to that friend of his I told you about who keeps the dog-hospital: and the friend is going to keep him until he reforms. Isn’t it a perfectly splendid idea?”
Mr. Pett blanched. The frightfulness of reality had exceeded anticipation.
“But, Ann!”
The words came from him in a strangled bleat. His whole being was paralysed by a clammy horror. This was beyond the uttermost limit of his fears. And, to complete the terror of the moment, he knew, even while he rebelled against the insane lawlessness of her scheme, that he was going to agree to it, and–worst of all–that deep, deep down in him there was a feeling toward it which did not dare to come to the surface but which he knew to be approval.
“Of course Jerry would do it for nothing,” said Ann, “but I promised him that you would give him something for his trouble. You can arrange all that yourselves later.”
“But, Ann!… But, Ann!… Suppose your aunt finds out who did it!”
“Well, there will be a tremendous row!” said Ann composedly. “And you will have to assert yourself. It will be a splendid thing for you. You know you are much too kind to every one, uncle Peter. I don’t think there’s any one who would put up with what you do. Father told me in one of his letters that he used to call you Patient Pete as a boy.”