oo.

"Wal, Abe bought into one o' the comp'nies--was the heaviest stockholder,
in fac', so nat'rally was cap'n. He never headed no crew--not as I ever
heard on. But the title kinder stuck; and I don't dispute Abe likes it."

"But about his brother--this Captain Amazon?" The line of Cap'n Joab
Beecher's jaw, clean shaven above his whisker, looked very grim indeed,
and he wagged his head slowly. "I don't know what to make of all this
talk o' Cap'n Abe's," was his enigmatical reply.

Lawford turned to gaze curiously at the storekeeper. He certainly looked
to be of a salt flavor, did Cap'n Abe Silt, though so many of his years
had been spent behind the counter of this gloomy and cluttered shop. He
was not a large man, nor commanding to look upon. His eyes were too mild
for that--save when, perhaps, he grew excited in relating one of his
interminable stories about Cap'n Amazon.

Cap'n Amazon Silt, it seemed, had been everything on sea and land that a
mariner could be. No romance of the sea, or sea-going, was too
remarkable to be capped by a tale of one of Cap'n Amazon's experiences.
Some of these stories of wild and remarkable happenings, the storekeeper
had told over and over again until they were threadbare.

Cap'n Abe's brown, gray-streaked beard swept the breast of his blue
jersey. He was seldom seen without a tarpaulin on his head, and this had
made his crown as bare and polished as a shark's tooth. Under the bulk
of his jersey he might have been either thin or deep-chested, for the
observer could not easily judge. And nobody ever saw the storekeeper's
sleeves rolled up or the throat-latch of his shirt open.

Despite the fact that he held a thriving trade in his store on the Shell
Road (especially during the summer season) Cap'n Abe lived emphatically a
lonely life. Twenty years' residence meant little to Cardhaven folk.
Cap'n Abe was still an outsider to people who were so closely married and
intermarried that every human being within five miles of the Haven (not
counting the aristocrats of The Beaches) could honestly call each of the
others cousin in some degree.

The house and store was set on a lonely stretch of road. It was
unlighted at night, for the last street lamp had been fixed by the town
fathers at the Mariner's Chapel, as though they said to all mundane
illumination as did King Canute to the sea, "Thus far shalt thou come and
no farther."

Betty Gallup came cross lots each day to "rid u