“What is the matter?” the girl asked.  “Have you broken something—­or is the canary dead?”

“Sh!” warned Betty, her little brown eyes blinking rapidly.  “I heard something last night.”

“I didn’t.  I slept like a baby.  The night before I heard that old foghorn——­”

“I mean,” interrupted Betty, “something was told me.”

“Well, go on.”  Louise made up her mind that she could not stem the tide of talk.

“About your uncle, Cap’n Abe.  He—­he never was seen to take that train to Boston.  I got it straight, or pretty average straight.  Mandy Baker told me, and Peke Card’s wife, Mary Lizbeth, told her, who got it right from Lute Craven who works in the post-office uptown, and Lute got it from Noah Coffin.  You know, he’t drives the ark you come over in from Paulmouth.  Well!  Noah was at Paulmouth depot as he always is of course when the clam train stops at five-thutty-five.  He says he didn’t see Cap’n Abe nor nobody that looked like him board that train yest’day mornin’.”

“Why, Betty!” Louise could only gasp.  This house-that-Jack-built narrative quite took her breath away.

“Besides,” went on Betty; “there’s more to it.  Cap’n Abe’s chest was took back to the depot by Perry Baker when he brought your trunks over, sure ’nough.  And Perry Baker says he shipped that chest to Boston for your uncle, marked to be called for.  It went by express.”

“But—­but what of it?” asked the puzzled girl.

“Humph!  Stands to reason,” declared Mrs. Gallup, “that Cap’n Abe wouldn’t have done no such foolish thing as that.  It costs money to ship a heavy sea chest by express.  He could have took it on his ticket as baggage, free gratis, for nothin’!”

“I really don’t see,” Louise now said rather severely, “that these facts you state—­if they are facts—­are any of our business, Betty.  Uncle Abram might have taken the train at some other station.  He was not sure, perhaps, whether he would join the ship Cap’n Amazon recommended, so why should he not send his chest by express?”

“Cap’n Am’zon!  Humph!” sniffed Betty.  “Nobody knows whether that’s his name or not. He comes here without a smitch of clo’es, as near as I can find out.”

Louise was amused; yet she was somewhat vexed as well.  The curiosity, as well as the animosity, displayed by Betty and others of the neighbors began to appall her.  If Cape Cod folk were, as her daddy-professor had declared, “the salt of the earth,” some of the salt seemed to have lost its savor.

“We were talking about Cap’n Abe,” said Louise severely.  “Just as he had his own good reasons for going away when and how he did, he probably had his reasons for taking nobody into his confidence.  This Perry Baker, the expressman, must know that Cap’n Abe sent the trunk from the house, here.”

“Humph!  Yes!  Nobody’s denyin’ that.”

“Then Cap’n Abe must have known exactly what he wished to do.  Cap’n Amazon surely had nothing to do with the chest, with how his brother took the train, or with where he took it.  Really, Betty, what do you suspect Cap’n Amazon has done?”