A Jolly Fellowship Part 24

"Home?" we cried out together. "When?"

"To-morrow," said Corny, "on the 'Tigress.'"

All our good news and pleasant letters counted for nothing now.

"How?--why?" said I. "Why do you have to go? Isn't this something new?"

Rectus looked as if he had lost his knife, and I'm sure I had never thought that I should care so much to hear that a girl--no relation--was going away the next day.

"Yes, it is something new," said Corny, who certainly had been crying, although we didn't notice it at first. "It's a horrid old lawsuit.

Father just heard of it in a letter. There's one of his houses, in New York, that's next to a lot, and the man that owns the lot says father's house sticks over four inches on his lot, and he has sued him for that,--just think of it! four inches only! You couldn't do anything with four inches of dirt if you had it; and father didn't know it, and he isn't going to move his wall back, now that he does know it, for the people in the house would have to cut all their carpets, or fold them under, which is just as bad, and he says he must go right back to New York, and, of course, we've all got to go, too, which is the worst of it, and mother and I are just awfully put out."

"What's the good of his going," asked Rectus. "Can't he get a lawyer to attend to it all?"

"Oh, you couldn't keep him here now," said Corny. "He's just wild to be off. The man who sued him is a horrid person, and father says that if he don't go right back, the next thing he'll hear will be that old Colbert will be trying to get a foot instead of four inches."

"Old Colbert!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Rectus, "I guess that must be my father."

If I had been Rectus, I don't think I should have been so quick to guess anything of that kind about my father; but perhaps he had heard things like that before. He took it as coolly as he generally took everything.

Corny was as red as a beet.

"Your father!" she exclaimed. "I don't believe it. I'll go this very minute and see."

Rectus was right. The stingy hankerer after what Corny called four inches of dirt was his father. Mr. Chipperton came up to us and talked about the matter, and it was all as plain as daylight. When he found that Mr. Colbert was the father of Rectus, Mr. Chipperton was very much surprised, and he called no more names, although I am sure he had been giving old Colbert a pretty disagreeable sort of a record. But he sat down by Rectus, and talked to him as if the boy were his own father instead of himself, and proved to him, by every law of property in English, Latin, or Sanscrit, that the four inches of ground were legally, lawfully, and without any manner of doubt, his own, and that it would have been utterly and absolutely impossible for him to have built his house one inch outside of his own land. I whispered to Rectus that the house might have swelled, but he didn't get a chance to put in the suggestion.

Rectus had to agree to all Mr. Chipperton said--or, at least, he couldn't differ with him,--for he didn't know anything on earth about the matter, and I guess he was glad enough when he got through. I'm sure I was. Rectus didn't say anything except that he was very sorry that the Chipperton family had to go home, and then he walked off to his room.

In about half an hour, when I went upstairs, I found Rectus had just finished a letter to his father.

"I guess that'll make it all right," he said, and he handed me the letter to read. It was a strictly business letter. No nonsense about the folks at home. He said that was the kind of business letter his father liked. It ran like this:

DEAR FATHER: Mr. Chipperton has told me about your suing him. If he really has set his house over on four inches of your lot, I wish you would let it stand there. I don't care much for him, but he has a nice wife and a pleasant girl, and if you go on suing him the whole lot of them will leave here to-morrow, and they're about the only people I know, except Gordon. If you want to, you can take a foot off any one of my three lots, and that ought to make it all right.

Your affectionate son, SAMUEL COLBERT.

"Have you three lots?" I asked, a good deal surprised, for I didn't know that Rectus was a property-owner.

"Yes," said he; "my grandmother left them to me."

"Are they right next to your father's lot, which Chipperton cut into?"

"No, they're nowhere near it," said Rectus.

I burst out laughing.

"That letter wont do any good," I said.

"You'll see," said Rectus, and he went off to mail it.

I don't know what kind of a business man Mr. Chipperton was, but when Rectus told him that he had written a letter to his father which would make the thing all right, he was perfectly satisfied; and the next day we all went out in a sail-boat to the coral-reef, and had a splendid time, and the "Tigress" went off without any Chippertons. I think Mr.

Chipperton put the whole thing down as the result of his lecture to Rectus up in the silk-cotton tree.

CHAPTER XV.

A STRANGE THING HAPPENS TO ME.

For several days after our hot chase after Priscilla, we saw nothing of this ex-emissary. Indeed, we began to be afraid that something had happened to her. She was such a regular attendant at the hotel-door-market, that people were talking about missing her black face and her chattering tongue. But she turned up one morning as gay and skippy as ever, and we saw her leaning against the side of one of the door-ways of the court in her favorite easy att.i.tude, with her head on one side and one foot crossed over the other, which made her look like a bronze figure such as they put under kerosene lamps. In one hand she had her big straw hat, and in the other a bunch of rose-buds. The moment she saw Corny she stepped up to her.

"Wont you buy some rose-buds, missy?" she said. "De puttiest rose-buds I ever brought you yit."

Corny looked at her with a withering glare, but Priscilla didn't wither a bit. She was a poor hand at withering.

"Please buy 'em, missy. I kep' 'em fur you. I been a-keepin' 'em all de mornin'."

"I don't see how you dare ask me to buy your flowers!" exclaimed Corny.

"Go away! I never want to see you again. After all you did----"

"Please, missy, buy jist this one bunch. These is the puttiest red-rose buds in dis whole town. De red roses nearly all gone."

"Nearly all gone," said I. "What do you mean by telling such a fib?"--I was going to say "lie," which was nearer the truth (if that isn't a bull); but there were several ladies about, and Priscilla herself was a girl. "You know that there are red roses here all the year."

"Please, boss," said Priscilla, rolling her eyes at me like an innocent calf, "wont you buy dese roses fur missy? They's the puttiest roses I ever brought her yit."

"I guess you've got a calcareous conscience, haven't you?" said Rectus.

Priscilla looked at him, for a moment, as if she thought that he might want to buy something of that kind, but as she hadn't it to sell, she tried her flowers on him.

"Please, boss, wont you buy dese roses fur----"

"No," said Rectus, "I wont."

And we all turned and walked away. It was no use to blow her up. She wouldn't have minded it. But she lost three customers.

I said before that I was the only one in our party who liked fis.h.i.+ng, and for that reason I didn't go often, for I don't care about taking trips of that kind by myself. But one day Mr. Burgan and the other yellow-legs told me that they were going to fish in Lake Killarney, a lovely little lake in the interior of the island, about five miles from the town, and that if I liked I might go along. I did like, and I went.

I should have been better pleased if they had gone there in a carriage; but this wouldn't have suited these two fellows, who had rigged themselves up in their buck-skin boots, and had all the tramping and fis.h.i.+ng rigs that they used in the Adirondacks and other sporting places where they told me they had been. It was a long and a warm walk, and trying to find a good place for fis.h.i.+ng, after we got to the lake, made the work harder yet. We didn't find any good place, and the few fish we caught didn't pay for the trouble of going there; but we walked all over a big pineapple plantation and had a splendid view from the highest hill on the whole island.

It was pretty late in the afternoon when we reached home, and I made up my mind that the next time I went so far to fish, in a semi-tropical country, I'd go with a party who wore suits that would do for riding.

Rectus and Corny and Mrs. Chipperton were up in the silk-cotton tree when I got home, and I went there and sat down. Mrs. Chipperton lent me her fan.

Corny and Rectus were looking over the "permission paper" which the English governor had given us.