FullReads

“One Monday evening about the middle of the month I went over to Phoebe Ann’s to borrow some matches. Barbara wasn’t in–gone out to lock up the hens, or some such fool excuse. But Phoebe was busting full of joy. Cap’n Eben had arrived in New York a good deal sooner’n was expected and would be home on Thursday morning.

“‘He’s going from Boston to Provincetown on the steamer, Wednesday,’ says Phoebe. ‘He’s got some business over there. Then he’s coming home from Provincetown on the early train. Ain’t that splendid?’

“I thought ’twas splendid for more reasons than one, and I went out feeling good. But as I come round the corner of the house there was somebody by the back gate, and I heard a girl’s voice sayin’: ‘Oh, no, no! I can’t! I can’t!’

“If I hadn’t trod on a stick maybe I’d have heard more, but the racket broke up the party. Barbara come hurrying past me into the house, and by the light from the back door, I see her face. ‘Twas white as a clam-shell, and she looked frightened to death.

“Thinks I: ‘That’s funny! It’s a providence Eben’s coming home so soon.’

“And the next day I saw her again, and she was just as white and wouldn’t look me in the eye. Wednesday, though, I felt better, for the servants on the Davidson place told me that Allie had gone to Boston on the morning train to be gone for good, and that they was going to shut up the house and haul up the launch in a day or so.

“Early that afternoon, as I was coming from my shanty to the bluff on my way to the shore after dinner, I noticed a steam-yacht at anchor two mile or so off the bar. She must have come there sence I got in, and I wondered whose she was. Then I see a dingey with three men aboard rowing in, and I walked down the beach to meet ’em.

“Sometimes I think there is such things as what old Parson Danvers used to call ‘dispensations.’ This was one of ’em. There was a feller in a uniform cap steering the dingey, and, b’lieve it or not, I’ll be everlastingly keelhauled if he didn’t turn out to be Ben Henry, who was second mate with me on the old Seafoam. He was surprised enough to see me, and glad, too, but he looked sort of worried.

“‘Well, Ben,’ says I, after we had shook hands, ‘well, Ben,’ I says, ‘my shanty ain’t exactly the United States Hotel for gilt paint and bill of fare, but I HAVE got eight or ten gallons of home-made cherry rum and some terbacker and an extry pipe. You fall into my wake.’

“‘I’d like to, Obed,’ he says; ‘I’d like to almighty well, but I’ve got to go up to the store, if there is such a thing in this metropolus, and buy some stuff that I forgot to get in Newport. You see, we got orders to sail in a tearing hurry, and–‘

“‘Send one of them fo’mast hands to the store,’ says I. ‘You got to come with me.’

“He hemmed and hawed a while, but he was dry, and I shook the cherry-rum jug at him, figuratively speaking, so finally he give in.

“‘You buy so and so,’ says he to his men, passing ’em a ten-dollar bill. ‘And mind, you don’t know nothing. If anybody asks, remember that yacht’s the Mermaid–M-U-R-M-A-D-E,’ he says, ‘and she belongs to Mr. Jones, of Mobile, Georgia.’

“So the men went away, and me and Ben headed for my shanty, where we moored abreast of each other at the table, with a jug between us for a buoy, so’s to speak. We talked old times and spun yarns, and the tide went out in the jug consider’ble sight faster than ’twas ebbing on the flats. After a spell I asked him about the man that owned the yacht.