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“‘Just one cent,’ said Alice, taking the words out of my mouth, ‘and what is more, we are going to have her repaired for you. She isn’t much hurt.’ So the boy stammered out the best kind of a ‘thank you’ that he could manage, and the look in his eyes made up for the lack of words. That was the time that he came nearest to crying. But Alice saved him by asking what he was going to do with the boat.

“He had an idea that he could run her himself, perhaps with another man to help him, for fishing in the fall, and for pleasure parties in the summer. He didn’t want to cut loose from home altogether and sell the boat. Perhaps Dad might come back, some day, or send a letter. Anyway Johnny wanted to stay by a seafaring life.

“So we arranged the repairs and all that, and got a man to help on the homeward trip, and after a few days Johnny sailed off with his patrimony. That is what Alice and I consider our neatest job of salvage.”

“Did it work all right?” I asked.

“Finely,” said Will Hermann, “like a charm.”

“And where is the lad now?”

“Bo’sun’s mate on a certain destroyer somewhere off the coast of France, fighting in the U. S. Navee.”

“And the father?” I inquired, being one of those old-fashioned persons who like all the loose ends of a story to be tied up. “Was anything ever heard of him?”

“That,” answered my friend, carefully shaking out the ashes of his pipe beyond the crow’s-nest rail, “that belongs in a different compartment of the ship.”