“Ye-es, I suppose so,” was the reply, in no delighted voice.

“It rests with you, Harve.  You can take cover behind your mama, of course, and put her on to fussing about your nerves and your high-strungness and all that kind of poppycock.”

“Have I ever done that?” said Harvey, uneasily.

His father turned where he sat and thrust out a long hand.  “You know as well as I do that I can’t make anything of you if you don’t act straight by me.  I can handle you alone if you’ll stay alone, but I don’t pretend to manage both you and Mama.  Life’s too short, anyway.”

“Don’t make me out much of a fellow, does it?”

“I guess it was my fault a good deal; but if you want the truth, you haven’t been much of anything up to date.  Now, have you?”

“Umm!  Disko thinks . . .  Say, what d’you reckon it’s cost you to raise me from the start—­first, last and all over?”

Cheyne smiled.  “I’ve never kept track, but I should estimate, in dollars and cents, nearer fifty than forty thousand; maybe sixty.  The young generation comes high.  It has to have things, and it tires of ’em, and—­the old man foots the bill.”

Harvey whistled, but at heart he was rather pleased to think that his upbringing had cost so much.  “And all that’s sunk capital, isn’t it?”

“Invested, Harve.  Invested, I hope.”

“Making it only thirty thousand, the thirty I’ve earned is about ten cents on the hundred.  That’s a mighty poor catch.”  Harvey wagged his head solemnly.

Cheyne laughed till he nearly fell off the pile into the water.

“Disko has got a heap more than that out of Dan since he was ten; and Dan’s at school half the year, too.”

“Oh, that’s what you’re after, is it?”

“No.  I’m not after anything.  I’m not stuck on myself any just now—­that’s all. . . .  I ought to be kicked.”

“I can’t do it, old man; or I would, I presume, if I’d been made that way.”

“Then I’d have remembered it to the last day I lived—­and never forgiven you,” said Harvey, his chin on his doubled fists.

“Exactly.  That’s about what I’d do.  You see?”

“I see.  The fault’s with me and no one else.  All the same, something’s got to be done about it.”

Cheyne drew a cigar from his vest-pocket, bit off the end, and fell to smoking.  Father and son were very much alike; for the beard hid Cheyne’s mouth, and Harvey had his father’s slightly aquiline nose, close-set black eyes, and narrow, high cheek-bones.  With a touch of brown paint he would have made up very picturesquely as a Red Indian of the story-books.

“Now you can go on from here,” said Cheyne, slowly, “costing me between six or eight thousand a year till you’re a voter.  Well, we’ll call you a man then.  You can go right on from that, living on me to the tune of forty or fifty thousand, besides what your mother will give you, with a valet and a yacht or a fancy-ranch where you can pretend to raise trotting-stock and play cards with your own crowd.”