Many delightful weeks Skippy spent after he was up and around. Day after day, he and Big Joe roamed the length and breadth of the river, and often they went down the bay and across to some unfrequented beach where they swam and fished to their hearts’ content.

Skippy soon showed the effects of his healthful life and Mrs. Duffy’s fine cooking. He was browned from head to foot and his flat chest had expanded two inches. And what was more, he had learned to triumph over tears.
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That in itself was a great achievement, for he had great need to practice self-control during the fall and the winter following. The gods themselves seemed to have cast sorrowful glances over the Minnie M. Baxter and Skippy’s mettle was tried to the breaking point sometimes, yet always he came up smiling. Very often it was a poignant smile, the kind that pierced Big Joe Tully’s almost invulnerable heart and set him to doing all sorts of extravagant things so that he might see the pain effaced from the boy’s face and hear him laugh happily.

That was why on the evening of Toby’s retrial, Big Joe left the shanty of the Minnie M. Baxter in awkward haste. He had left Skippy smiling a smile so poignant that he could bear it no longer.

“Big Joe,” the boy said when they were dawdling over the most luxurious meal that Tully’s money could buy, “it was most like throwin’ money away, huh? They don’t wanta let Pop get out, I guess. They can’t find the man that really did it and they’ve gotta have somebody so I s’pose they think it might’s well be my Pop. Now he will be in for life on account of the way they tripped him up in his answers. Gee, how could he remember word for word what he said at his first trial? People don’t remember word for word ’bout things like that. Poor Pop was so nervous I got chills down my back.”

“Don’t ye be gettin’ down, kid,” Tully protested; “’tis not sayin’ we’re licked till they turn down an appeal. We got some more dough.”
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“So much money,” said Skippy with a note of wonder in his high-pitched voice. “Gee, Big Joe, you’ve spent so much on Pop an’ me already. Now you wanta spend the last you got! Gee whiz, I can’t let you—I can’t! Much as I wanta see Pop free. It ain’t fair lettin’ you spend all your hard-earned money....”

Tully had long since learned that he could not lie to Skippy.

“Sure an’ this last coin ain’t hard-earned, kid,” he said not a little abashed. “So ye see ’cause it ain’t, it might’s well be used for springin’ your old man.”

“All right, if you say it like that,” said Skippy with a slightly reproving smile. Suddenly he squared his shoulders; then: “Anyway, next to Pop, Big Joe, I like you best. Gee, ain’t you been just like Pop even! So I don’t care if that money’s not so straight, but d’ye think it’ll be lucky for Pop? Sometimes I wonder if crooked money ain’t hard luck in the end. Maybe when you’re broke you can start over clean?”

“We’ll see what the breaks’ll be bringin’ this winter, kid,” Big Joe had mumbled. “We’ll see, so we will.”

And it was Skippy’s answering smile that drove Big Joe off the barge for a few hours. When he returned late in the evening, he had a fluffy sort of bundle in his big arms and an expansive smile on his face.
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“Three guesses what’s in me arms,” he said with a mischievous wink, standing half in and half out of the doorway.

“Is it dead or alive?” Skippy asked chuckling.

“’Tis the liveliest little guy ye ever see.” Big Joe stooped over and released the fluffy bundle from his arms and presently an Airedale pup put its four young and rather unsteady legs on the shanty floor.

Skippy laughed out loud. He twisted his hands together in a gesture of delight, then got to his knees and coaxed the puppy to him.

“It’s got brown eyes like a reg’lar angel,” he said.

“An’ brown legs like the divil,” Big Joe laughed; “the divil for runnin’ into mischief. The man what I bought him from said he was a son-of-a-sufferin’ swordfish for runnin’ an’ chewin’. But he’ll be gettin’ better as he gets older, so he will. Ain’............