This story began when Issy first acquired the Lady May.  The Higgins home stood on the slope close to the boat landing, and when Issy came in from quahauging, Gertie was likely to be in the back yard, hanging out the clothes or watering the flower garden.  Sometimes she spoke to him of her own accord, concerning the weather or other important topics.  Once she even asked him if he were going to the Fourth of July ball at the town-hall.  It took him until the next morning—­like other warriors, Issy was cursed with shyness—­to summon courage enough to ask her to go to the ball with him.  Then he found it was too late; she was going with her cousin, Lennie Bloomer.  But he felt that she had offered him the opportunity, and was happy and hopeful accordingly.

This, however, was before she went to Boston to study telegraphy.  When she returned, with a picture hat and a Boston accent, it was to preside at the telegraph instrument in the little room adjoining the post office at her father’s store.  When Issy bowed blushingly outside the window of the telegraph room, he received only the airiest of frigid nods.  Was there what Lord Lyndhurst would have called “another”?  It would seem not.  Old Mr. Higgins, her father, encouraged no bows nor attentions from young men, and Gertie herself did not appear to desire them.  So Issy gave up his tales of savage butchery for those of love and blisses, adored in silence, and hoped—­always hoped.

But why had the blacksmith seemed surprised at the departure of Sam Bartlett, the “dudey” vacationist from the city, whose father had, years ago, been Beriah Higgins’s partner in the fish business?  And why had he coupled the Bartlett name with that of Gertie, who had been visiting her father’s maiden sister at Trumet, the village next below East Harniss, as Denboro is the next above it?  Issy’s suspicions were aroused, and he wondered.

Suddenly he heard voices in the shop above him.  The window was open and he heard them plainly.

“Well!  Well!” It was the blacksmith who uttered the exclamation.  “Why, Bartlett, how be you?  What you doin’ over here?  Thought you’d gone back to Boston.  I heard you had.”

Slowly, cautiously, the astonished quahauger rose from the sawhorse and peered over the window sill.  There were two visitors in the shop.  One was Ed Burns, proprietor of the Denboro Hotel and livery stable.  The other was Sam Bartlett, the very same who had left East Harniss that morning, bound, ostensibly, for Boston.  Issy sank back again and listened.

“Yes, yes!” he heard Sam say impatiently; “I know, but—­see here, Jake, where can I hire a horse in this God-forsaken town?”

“Well, well, Sam!” continued Larkin.  “I was just figurin’ that Beriah had got the best of you after all, and you’d had to give it up for this time.  Thinks I, it’s too bad!  Just because your dad and Beriah Higgins had such a deuce of a row when they bust up in the fish trade, it’s a shame that he won’t hark to your keepin’ comp’ny with Gertie.  And you doin’ so well; makin’ twenty dollars a week up to the city—­Ed told me that—­and—­”