“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 substitute 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.