Then afterwards I had to teach school--in a rough
district. Once some big boys tried to throw me into a snowdrift. We
had a terrible fight."
"It must have been awful," says Mrs. Mumford. "Those big, brutal boys!
I can just see them. Did--did you kill any of them?"
"I hit one on the nose quite hard," says Rupert. "Then, of course, I
had to give up teaching. I meant to start off for sea that winter, but
father was taken sick. Lungs, you know. So we sold out the store and
bought a place down in Florida, an orange grove. It was on the west
coast, near the Gulf.
"That's where I learned to sail. And after father died I took my share
of what he left us and bought a cruising boat. I didn't like working
on the grove--messing around with smelly fertilizer, sawing off dead
limbs, doing all that silly spraying. And my brother Jim could do it
so much better. So I fished and took out winter tourists on
excursions: things like that. Summers I'd go cruising down the coast.
I would be gone for weeks at a time. I've been out in some fearful
storms, too.
"I got to know a lot of strange characters who live on those west coast
keys. They're bad, some of them--kill you for a few dollars. Others
are real friendly, like the old fellow who told me about the buried
treasure.
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