“What d’ye mean?” repeated Betty, breathless.

“I mean to keep my cabin locked,” he told her in a perfectly passive voice, but in a manner that halted her suddenly, angry as she was.  “I don’t want no woman messin’ with my berth nor with my duds.  That door’s no more locked against you than it is against my niece.  You do the rest of your work and don’t you worry your soul ’bout my cabin.”

Louise, who was an observant spectator of this contest, expected at first that Betty would not stand the indignity—­that she would resign from her situation on the spot.

But that hard, compelling stare of Cap’n Amazon seemed to tame her.  And Betty Gallup was a person not easily tamed.  She spluttered a little more, then returned to her work.  Though she was sullen all day, she did not offer to reopen the discussion.

“What a master he must have been on his own quarter-deck,” Louise thought.  “And he must have seen rough times, as that Lawford Tapp suggested.  My! he’s not much like Cap’n Abe, after all.”

But with her, Cap’n Amazon was as gentle as her own father.  He stood on his dignity with the customers who came to the store, and with Betty; but he was most kindly toward Louise in every look and word.

That under his self-contained and stern exterior dwelt a very tender heart, the girl was sure.  For the absent Cap’n Abe he appeared to feel a strong man’s good-natured scorn for a weak one; but Louise saw him stand often before Jerry’s cage, chirping to the bird and playing with him.  And at such times there was moisture in Cap’n Amazon’s eye.

“Blind’s a bat!  Poor little critter!” he would murmur.  “All the sunshine does is to warm him; he can’t see it no more.  Out-o’-doors ain’t nothin’ to him now.”

Nor would he allow anybody but himself to attend to the needs of poor little Jerry.  He had promised Abe, he said.  He kept that promise faithfully.

Diddimus, the cat, was entirely another problem.  At first, whenever he saw Cap’n Amazon approach, he howled and fled.  Then, gradually, an unholy curiosity seemed to enthrall the big tortoise-shell.  He would peer around corners at Cap’n Amazon, stare at him with wide yellow eyes through open doorways, leap upon the window sill and glower at the substitute storekeeper—­in every way showing his overweening interest in the man.  But he absolutely would not go within arm’s reach of him.

“I always did say a cat’s a plumb fool,” declared Cap’n Amazon.  “They’ll desert ship as soon as wink.  Treacherous critters, the hull tribe.  Why, when I was up country in Cuba once, I stopped at a man’s hacienda and he had a tame wildcat—­had had it from a kitten.  Brought it up on a bottle himself.

“He thought a heap of that critter, and when he laid in his hammock under the trees—­an’ that was most of the time, for them Caribs are as lazy as the feller under the tree that wished for the cherries to fall in his mouth!—­Yes, sir! when he laid in his hammock that yaller-eyed demon would lay in it, too, and purr like an ordinary cat.