I would sell out if I was you.'"

"He's going round with a different version, Hat," said Lena Kidder.
"Didn't he laugh as he says he did?"

"Laugh? I would like to see the man that would laugh," said Hat in her
great hardy voice. Her fist closed round the mug of milk. "I'll have him
laughing on the wrong side of his face."

"He says he give a bellow fit to wake the dead."

"That man? He stood there like a brazen image, and I had to say to him:
'Are you going to let me stand here in this perishing cold without so
much as lifting a hand? Just you stir your stumps and hotfoot a slug of
square-faced gin into me if you know what's for your own best good.'

"That man? Why, I taught him all he knows. I was sailing my own ships
when he was a deckhand."

The truth was--and Pearl Higgins, his wife, could never quite forget it
or forgive it--Elmer had once shipped before the mast on Hat Tyler's
ships; and Hat was not likely to forget it either. Rumor had it that Hat
and Elmer had been as thick as thieves at one time, and that it was
You-tickle-me-and-I'll-kiss-you between them then. But if such was the
case they had later had a falling out, and Elmer had gone one way and
Hat another.

"As a matter of fact I was more glad than sorry at what took place," Hat
now continued. "That cargo of paving stones up and shifted and started
her in a new place. She was leaking like a sieve. That little rat of an
underwriter said to me: 'If I were you, as soon as I got out of sight of
land I would turn round and kick the stern off her with a tap of my
foot.' 'Maybe I will, for all you know,' I said. I'd like to see them
bamboozle me!"

"Trust you, Hat!" said Lena Kidder in a voice of admiration.

"And so Elmer Higgins has the cast-iron nerve to say that he laughed at
me to my face, does he?" continued Mrs. Tyler. "Well, he lies when he
says it."

So the lie was passed, and hostilities began; for before night word came
to Pearl Higgins that Hat Tyler was back in town running down her
husband for his part in the rescue. Elmer's wife, a dark thin-featured
woman, had felt all along that Elmer had never been able to shake off
vestiges of that time when he and Hat had been so kind of hand-in-glove;
and she had privately determined to put the woman at a safe distance
once and for all.

"The long and short of it is," she said grimly when Elmer had come home
and spread his navigation books on the kitchen table "she's round town
calling you a