"Oh, really now!" protests Mrs. Mumford, duckin' her chin kittenish. "I--I couldn't do it alone. Perhaps, though, if you young people would--" "Oh, we will; won't we, Torchy?" says Vee. I nods. Inside of half an hour, too, we had towed Rupert into a corner beside the widow and had him surrounded. "Tell me, Captain," says Mrs. Mumford impulsive, "have you not led a most romantic life?" Rupert rolls his eyes at her quick, then steadies 'em down and blinks solemn. Kind of weird, starey eyes, them buttermilk blue panes of his are. "I--I don't say much about it, as a rule," says he, droppin' his eyelids modest. "There!" exclaims Mrs. Mumford. "I just knew it was so. One daring adventure after another, I suppose, with no thought of fear." "Oh, I've been afraid plenty of times," says Rupert, "but somehow I-- Well, I've gone on." "Isn't he splendid?" asks Mrs. Mumford, turnin' to us. "Just like a hero in a book! But we would like to know from the very beginning. As a boy, now?" "There wasn't much," protests Rupert. "You see, I lived in a little town in southern Illinois. Father ran a general store. I had to help in it--sold shingle nails, molasses, mower teeth, overalls. How I hated that! But there was the creek and the muck pond. I had an old boat. I played smuggler and pirate. I used to love to read pirate books. I wanted to go to sea." "So you ran away and became a sailor," adds Mrs. Mumford, clappin' her hands enthusiastic. "I planned to lots of times," says Rupert, "but father made me go through the academy. 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.