Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper Part 39

"He's an old pirate!" concluded Betty Gallup. Here Louise found her voice--and she spoke with decision.

"I shall stay just the same, aunt. I am satisfied that you all misjudge Captain Amazon." His face--the sudden flash of grat.i.tude in it--thanked her.

"Louise!" cried her aunt.

"You better come away, Miss Lou," said Betty. "The constable'll git that old pirate; that's what'll happen to him."

"Stop!" exclaimed Louise. "I'll listen to no more. I do not believe these things you say. And neither of you can prove them. I'm going to bed. Good-night, Aunt Euphemia," and she marched out of the room.

That closed the discussion. Cap'n Amazon bowed Mrs. Conroth politely out of the door and Betty went with her. Louise did not get to sleep in her chamber overhead for hours; nor did she hear the captain come upstairs at all.

In the morning's post there was a letter for Louise from her father--a letter that had been delayed. It had been mailed at the same time the one to Aunt Euphemia was sent. The _Curlew_ would soon turn her bows Bostonward, the voyage having been successful from a scientific point of view. Professor Grayling even mentioned the loss of a small boat in a squall, when it had been cast adrift from the taffrail by accident.

Betty, with face like a thundercloud, had brought the letter up to Louise. When the girl had hastily read it through she ran down to show it to Cap'n Amazon. She found him reading an epistle of his own, while Cap'n Joab, Milt Baker, Washy Gallup, and several other neighbors hovered near.

"Yep. I got one myself," announced Cap'n Amazon.

"Oh, captain!"

"Yep. From Abe. Good reason why your father didn't speak of Abe in his letter to your a'nt. Didn't in yours, did he?"

Louise shook her head.

"No? Listen here," Cap'n Amazon said. "'I haven't spoke to Professor Grayling. He don't know Abe Silt from the jib-boom. Why should he? I am a foremast hand and he lives abaft. But he is a fine man.

Everybody says so. We've had some squally weather----'

"Well! that's nothin'. Ahem!"

He went on, reading bits to the interested listeners now and then, and finally handed the letter to Cap'n Joab Beecher. The latter, looking mighty queer indeed, adjusted his spectacles and spread out the sheet.

"Ye-as," he admitted cautiously. "That 'pears to be Cap'n Abe's handwritin', sure 'nough."

"Course 'tis!" squealed Washy Gallup. "As plain, as plain!"

"Read it out," urged Milt while the captain went to wait upon a customer.

Louise listened with something besides curiosity. The letter was a rambling account of the voyage of the _Curlew_, telling little directly or exactly about the daily occurrences; but nothing in it conflicted with what Professor Grayling had written Louise--save one thing.

The girl realized that the arrival of this letter from Cap'n Abe had finally punctured that bubble of suspicion against the captain that had been blown overnight. It seemed certain and unshakable proof that the subst.i.tute storekeeper was just whom he claimed to be, and it once and for all put to death the idea that Cap'n Abe had not gone to sea in the _Curlew_.

Yet Louise had never been more puzzled since first suspicion had been roused against Cap'n Amazon. A single sentence in her father's letter could not be made to jibe with Cap'n Abe's epistle, and therefore she folded up her own letter and thrust it into her pocket. In speaking of his companions on shipboard, the professor had written:

"I am by far the oldest person aboard the _Curlew_, skipper included.

They are all young fellows, both for'ard and in the afterguard. Yet they treat me like one of themselves and I am having a most enjoyable time."

Cap'n Abe was surely much older than her daddy-prof! It puzzled her.

It troubled her. There was not a moment of that day when it was not the uppermost thought in her mind.

People came in from all around to read Cap'n Abe's letter and to congratulate Cap'n Amazon and Louise that the _Curlew_ was safe. The captain took the matter as coolly as he did everything else.

Louise watched him, trying to fathom his manner and the mystery about him. Yet, when the solution of the problem was developed, she was most amazed by the manner in which her eyes were opened.

Supper time was approaching, and the cooler evening breeze blew in through the living-room windows. Relieved for the moment from his store tasks, Cap'n Amazon appeared, rubbing his hands cheerfully, and briskly approached old Jerry's cage as he chirruped to the bird.

"Well! well! And how's old Jerry been to-day?" Louise heard him say.

Then: "Hi-mighty! What's this?"

Louise glanced in from the kitchen. She saw him standing before the cage, his chin sunk on his breast, the tears trickling down his mahogany face.

That hard, stern visage, with its sweeping piratical mustache and the red bandana above it, was a most amazing picture of grief.

"Oh! What is it?" cried the girl, springing to his side.

He pointed with shaking index finger to the bird within the cage.

"Dead!" he said brokenly, "Dead, Niece Louise! Poor old Jerry's dead--and him and me shipmates for so many, many years."

"Oh!" screamed the girl, grasping his arm. "_You are Cap'n Abe_!"

CHAPTER XXVII

SARGa.s.sO

After all, when she considered it later, Louise wondered only that she had not seen through the masquerade long before.

From the beginning--the very first night of her occupancy of the pleasant chamber over the store on the Sh.e.l.l Road--she should have understood the mystery that had had the whole neighborhood by the ears during the summer.

She, more than anybody else, should have seen through Cap'n Abe's masquerade. Louise had been in a position, she now realized, to have appreciated the truth.

"You are Cap'n Abe," she told him, and he did not deny it. Sadly he looked at the dead canary in the bottom of the cage, and wiped his eyes.

"Poor Jerry!" her uncle said, and in that single phrase all the outer husk of the rough and ready seaman--the character he had a.s.sumed in playing his part for so many weeks--sloughed away. He was the simple, tender-hearted, almost childish Cap'n Abe that she had met upon first coming to Cardhaven.

Swiftly through her mind the incidents of that first night and morning flashed. She remembered that he had prepared her--as he had prepared his neighbors--for the coming of this wonderful Cap'n Amazon, whose adventures he had related and whose praises he had sung for so many years.

Cap'n Abe had taken advantage of Perry Baker's coming with Louise's trunk to send off his own chest, supposedly filled with the clothes he would need on a sea voyage.

Then, the house clear of the expressman and Louise safe in bed, the storekeeper had proceeded to disguise himself as he had long planned to do.

Not content with the shaving of his beard only, he had dyed his hair and the sweeping piratical mustache left him. Walnut juice applied to his face and body had given him the stain of a tropical sun. Of course, this stain and the dye had to be occasionally renewed.

The addition of gold rings in his ears (long before pierced for the purpose, of course) and the wearing of the colored handkerchief to cover his bald crown completed a disguise that his own mother would have found hard to penetrate.