“Yes, sir.”

Sharon glanced shrewdly at him sidewise.

“You’re a better Whipple than any one else of your name ever got to be.”

“He didn’t understand; he was misled or something.”

“Or something,” echoed Sharon.  “Listen!  There’s one little job you got to do before you hole up out here.  You heard about him, of course—­the worry he’s been to poor Harvey and the rest.  Well, he’s down there in New York still acting squeamishy.  I want you should go down and put the fear of God into him.”

“I understand he’s mixed up with a lot of reds down there.”

“Red!  Him?  Humph!” Sharon here named an equally well-known primary colour—­not red.  Wilbur protested.

“You don’t get him,” persisted the old man.  “Listen, now!  He cast off the family like your father said he would.  Couldn’t accept another cent of Whipple money.  Going to work with his bare hands.  Dressed up for it like a hunter in one of these powder advertisements.  All he needed was a shotgun and a setter dog with his tail up.  And everybody in the house worried he’d starve to death.  Of course no one thought he’d work—­that was one of his threats they didn’t take seriously.  But they promised to sit tight, each and all, and bring him to time the sooner.

“Well, he didn’t come to time.  We learned he was getting money from some place.  He still had it.  So I begun to get my suspicions up.  Last night I got the bunch together, Gid and Harvey D. and Ella and Juliana, and I taxed ’em with duplicity, and every last one of ’em was guilty as paint—­every goshed last one!  Every one sending him fat checks unbeknownst to the others.  Even Juliana!  I never did suspect her.  ’I did it because it’s all a romance to him,’ says she.  ’I wanted him to go his way, whatever it was, and find it bright.’

“Wha’d you think of that from a girl of forty-eight or so that can tinker a mowing machine as good as you can?  I ask you!  Of course I’d suspected the rest.  A set of mushheads.  Maybe they didn’t look shamed when I exposed ’em!  Each one had pictured the poor boy down there alone, undergoing hardship with his toiling workers or whatever you call ’em, and, of course, I thought so myself.”

“How much did you send him?” demanded Wilbur, suddenly.

“Not half as much as the others,” returned Sharon in indignant triumph.  “If they’d just set tight like they promised and let me do the little I done——­”

“You were going to sit tight, too, weren’t you?”

“Well, of course, that was different.  Of course I was willing to shell out a few dollars now and then if he was going to be up against it for a square meal.  After all, he was Whipple by name.  Of course he ain’t got Whipple stuff in him.  That young man’s talk always did have kind of a nutty flavour.  You come right down to it, he ain’t a Whipple in hide nor hair.  Why, say, he ain’t even two and seventy-five-hundredths per cent.  Whipple!”