“Diddimus will get over it,” said the amused Louise.

“There’s that bird,” Cap’n Amazon said suddenly, looking around at the cage hanging in the sunlit window.  “What’s Abe call him?”

“Jerry.”

“And he told me to be hi-mighty tender with that canary.  Wouldn’t trust nobody else, he said, to feed and water him.”  He rose from the table, leaving his breakfast.  “I wonder what Jerry thinks of me?”

He whistled to the bird and thrust a big forefinger between the wires of the cage.  Immediately, with an answering chirp, the canary hopped along his perch with a queer sidewise motion and, reaching the finger, sprang upon it with a little flutter of its wings.

“There!” cried Cap’n Amazon, with boyish relief. “He takes to me all right.”

“That don’t show nothin’,” said Betty Gallup from the doorway.  She had removed her hat and coat and was revealed now as a woman approaching seventy, her iron-gray hair twisted into a “bob” so that it could be completely hidden when she had the hat on her head.  “That don’t show nothin’,” she repeated grimly.

Cap’n Amazon jerked his head around to look at her, demanding:  “Why don’t it, I want to know?”

“’Cause the bird’s pretty near stone-blind.”

“Blind!” gasped Louise, pity in her tone.

“It can’t be,” murmured the captain, hastily facing the window again.

“I found that out a year an’ more ago,” Betty announced.  “Didn’t want to tell Cap’n Abe—­he was that foolish about the old bird.  Jerry’s used to Cap’n Abe chirping to him and putting his finger ’twixt the slats of the cage for him to perch on.  He just thinks you’re Cap’n Abe.”

She clumped out into the kitchen again in her heavy shoes.  Cap’n Amazon came slowly back to his chair.  “Blind!” he repeated.  “I want to know!  Both his deadlights out.  Too bad!  Too bad!”

He did not seem to care for any more breakfast.

Footsteps in the store soon brought the substitute shopkeeper to his feet again.

“I s’pose that’s somebody come aboard for a yard o’ tape, or the seizings of a pair of shoes,” he growled.  “I’d ought to hauled in the gang-plank when we set down.”

He disappeared into the store and almost at once a shrill feminine voice greeted him as “Cap’n Abe.”  Vastly abused, Louise arose and softly followed to the store.

“Give me coupla dozen clothespins and a big darnin’ needle, Cap’n Abe.  I got my wash ready to hang out and found them pesky young ’uns of Myra Stout’s had got holt o’ my pin bag and fouled the pins all up usin’ ’em for markers in their garden.  I want—­land sakes!  Who—­what——­ Where’s Cap’n Abe?”

“He ain’t here just now,” Cap’n Amazon replied.  “I’m his brother.  You’ll have to pick out the needle you want.  I can find and count the clothespins, I guess.  Two dozen, you say?”

“Land sakes!  Cap’n Abe gone away?  Don’t seem possible.”