“I should hate at my age to have to start in and go to sea again,” mourned the Cap’n, after long meditation; “but I reckon I’ll either have to do that or go up in a balloon and stay there.  There’s too many tricks for me on land.  They ring in all they can think of themselves, and then they go to work and get a ghost to help.  I can’t whale the daylights out of the ghost, and I don’t suppose it would be proper for a first selectman to cuff the ears of the woman that said females was followin’ me, wailin’ and gnashin’ their teeth, but I can lick that yaller-fingered, cigarette-suckin’ dude, and pay the fine for so doin’—­and reckon I’ve got my money’s worth.”

“You need a guardeen,” snorted Hiram.  “She will put on her robe and accuse you of havin’ the ghost of a murdered man a-chasin’ you.”

The Cap’n grew white under his tan at this remark, made by Hiram in all guilelessness, and the memory of a certain Portuguese sailor, slipped overboard after a brief but busy mutiny, went shuddering through his thoughts.

“Ain’t got anything like that on your conscience, have you?” demanded the old showman, bluntly.

“She didn’t say anything only about women, did she?” evaded the Cap’n.

“Didn’t notice anything last night.  She may be savin’ something else for this evenin’,” was Hiram’s consoling answer.  His air and the baleful glance he bent on his neighbor indicated that he still held that irascible gentleman responsible for their joint misfortune.  And, to show further displeasure, he whirled and stumped away across the fields toward his home.

Cap’n Aaron Sproul attended the show at the town hall that evening.

He went alone, after his wife had plaintively sighed her refusal to accompany him.  He hadn’t intended to go.  But he was drawn by a certain fatal fascination.  He had a sailor’s superstitious half-belief in the supernatural.  He had caught word during the day of some astonishing revelations made by the seeress as to other persons in town, either by lucky guess or through secret pre-information, as his common sense told him.  And yet his sneaking superstition whispered that there was “something in it, after all.”  If that mesmerist’s spirit of retaliation should carry him to the extent of hinting about that Portuguese sailor, Cap’n Sproul resolved to be in that hall, ready to stand up and beard his defamers.

Evidently Professor Derolli spotted his enemy; for Madame Dawn, in order that vengeance should be certain of its mark, repeated the vague yet perfectly obvious hints of the preceding evening; and Cap’n Sproul was thankful for the mystic gloom of the hall that hid his fury and his shame.  He stole out of the place while the lights were still low.  He feared for his self-restraint if he were to remain, and he realized what a poor figure he would make standing up there and replying to the malicious farrago of the woman under the veil.

XVI