“I don’t know what he’s done,” snapped Betty.  “But I wouldn’t put nothin’ past him, from his looks.  The old pirate!”

“You will make me feel very bad if you continue to talk this way about my Uncle Amazon,” said the girl, far from feeling amused now.  “It is not right.  I hope you will not continue to repeat such things.  If you do you will some time be sorry for it, Betty.”

“Humph!” sniffed the woman.  “Mebbe I will.  But I’m warnin’ you, Miss Grayling.”

“Warning me of what?”

“Of that man.  That old sinner!  I never see a wickeder looking feller in my life—­and I’ve sailed with my father and my husband to ’most ev’ry quarter of the globe.  He may be twin brother to the Angel Gabriel; but if he is, his looks belie it!”

There was nothing in all this of enough consequence to disturb the girl, only in so far as she was vexed to find the neighbors so gossipy and unkind.  She gazed thoughtfully upon Cap’n Amazon as he sat across from her at the breakfast table, and wondered how anybody could see in his bronzed face anything sinister.

That he was rather ridiculously gotten up, it was true.  Those gold earrings!  But then, she had seen several of the older men about the store wearing rings in their ears.  If he did not always have that bright-colored kerchief on his head!  But then, he might wear that because he was susceptible to neuralgia and did not wish to wear a hat all the time as seemed to have been Cap’n Abe’s custom.

When he smiled at her and his eyes crinkled at the corners, he was as kindly of expression, she thought, as Cap’n Abe himself.  And he was a much better looking man than the brother who had gone away.

“Cap’n Amazon,” she said to him, “I believe you must be just full of stories of adventure and wonderful happenings by sea and land.  Uncle Abram said you had been everywhere.”

Cap’n Amazon seemed to take a long breath, then cleared his throat, and said: 

“I’ve been pretty nigh everywhere.  Seen some funny corners of the world, too, Louise.”

“You must tell me about your adventures,” she said.  “Your brother told me that you ran away to sea when you were only twelve years old and sailed on a long whaling voyage.”

“Yep. South Sea Belle.  Some old hooker, she was,” said Cap’n Amazon briskly.  “We was out three year and come home with our hold bustin’ with ile, plenty of baleen, some sperm, and a lump of ambergris as big as a nail keg—­or pretty nigh.”

Right then and there he launched into relating how the wondrous find of ambergris came to be made, neglecting his breakfast to do so.  He told it so vividly that Louise was enthralled.  The picture of the whaling bark beating up to the dead and festering leviathan lying on the surface of the ocean to which the exploding gases of decomposition had brought the hulk, lived in her mind for days.  The mate of the South Sea Belle, believing the creature had died of the disease supposedly caused by the growth of the ambergris in its intestines, had insisted upon boarding the carcass.  Driving away the clamorous and ravenous sea fowl, he had dug down with his blubber-spade into the vitals of the whale and recovered the gray, spongy, ill-smelling mass which was worth so great a sum to the perfumer.