“He’ll be along,” said Uncle Amasa, cheerily. “If there are to be doin’s at New Orleans, I’d like for him to see them and have them to tell to his children when he grows old. Life is pretty much all in the way you see it, and I’ve seen a heap, and I want that Jimmy should. The only comfort I’ve ever had in these long years since his pa disappeared is been in thinking of the strange secrets he must have got to know. I reckon if James was to come back from captivity alive, I’d be so curious to hear about his experiences that I’d clean forget to rejoice at having him home again.”
The young captain looked at Uncle Amasa. Queer characters were the rule rather than the exception among the settlers who had willingly turned their backs on civilization and safety, but in all his experience he knew of no other pioneer whose foolhardiness could be inspired by sheer curiosity.
“Do you mean to say, Uncle Amasa, that since you can’t go yourself the chance of your grandson seeing new things makes you insist upon my taking him, even if his presence jeopardizes the welfare and success of the whole expedition?”
“Jimmy will be good, I reckon,” said the old man, “and he’s old enough now; so I should like for him to see a little of the world.”
“You’re a shareholder, like the rest of us,” said the captain, “and I don’t mean to seem disrespectful; but I think you’re acting hastily, Uncle Amasa, and I hope you won’t encourage Jimmy to feel that he has a right to come without my consent, for I should have to put him off, and that would be a humiliation, and I don’t want to embitter him any more than I can help. But I won’t have him on the ark, and that’s all I can say about it.”
“Well, well, we won’t discuss it, son; we won’t discuss it at all,” said Uncle Amasa. “But I’d like to know how ye think I would look going back to his widowed mother and telling her that you didn’t trust her only son to conduct himself as bravely as any of you?”
A smile broke over the young captain’s face at the idea of any such message going to the acrid lady who had made the Claibornes’ home-clearing a place to be cautiously approached and discreetly avoided. “I wouldn’t say anything to Maria at all,” he advised. “I would just gradually get Jimmy out of the notion.”