re wasn't no other way of
getting provender.

We got there after a spell and set down on the big piazza with our souls
full of gratitude and our boots full of sand. Great, big, old-fashioned
house with fourteen big bedrooms in it, big barn, sheds, and one thing
or 'nother, and perched right on top of a hill with five or six acres
of ground 'round it. And how the March wind did whoop in off the sea and
howl and screech lonesomeness through the pine trees! You take it in
the middle of the night, with the shutters rattling and the old joists
a-creaking and Jonadab snoring like a chap sawing hollow logs, and if
it wan't joy then my name ain't Barzilla Wingate. I don't wonder Aunt
Sophrony died. I'd have died 'long afore she did if I knew I was checked
plumb through to perdition. There'd be some company where I was going,
anyhow.

The next morning after ballasting up with the truck we'd bought at the
store--the feller 'most keeled over when he found we was going to pay
cash for it--we went out on the piazza again, and looked at the breakers
and the pine trees and the sand, and held our hats on with both hands.

"Jonadab," says I, "what'll you take for your heirloom?"

"Well," he says, "Barzilla, the way I feel now, I think I'd take a
return ticket to Orham and be afraid of being took up for swindling at
that."

Neither of us says nothing more for a spell, and, first thing you know,
we heard a carriage rattling somewhere up the road. I was shipwrecked
once and spent two days in a boat looking for a sail. When I heard that
rattling I felt just the way I done when I sighted the ship that picked
us up.

"Judas!" says Jonadab, "there's somebody COMING!"

We jumped out of our chairs and put for the corner of the house. There
WAS somebody coming--a feller in a buggy, and he hitched his horse to
the front fence and come whistling up the walk.

He was a tall chap, with a smooth face, kind of sharp and knowing, and
with a stiff hat set just a little on one side. His clothes was new and
about a week ahead of up-to-date, his shoes shined till they lit up the
lower half of his legs, and his pants was creased so's you could mow
with 'em. Cool and slick! Say! in the middle of that deadliness and
compared to Jonadab and me, he looked like a bird of Paradise in a coop
of moulting pullets.

"Cap'n Wixon?" he says to me, sticking out a gloved flipper.

"Not guilty," says I. "There's the skipper. My name's Wingate."

"Glad to have