“What in the world has struck you?” shouted Ellis.  “Ain’t you goin’ to have that shoe fixed?  He can’t travel that way.  Seth!  Seth Atkins! . . .  By time, he is crazy!”

Seth did not deny the charge.  Climbing into the wagon, he took up the reins.

“Are you sure and sartin’ ’twas the Denboro road they took?” he demanded.

“Who took?  That feller and the Bascom woman?  Course I am, but . . .  Well, I swan!”

For the lightkeeper waited to hear no more.  He struck the unsuspecting Joshua with the end of the reins and, with a jump, the old horse started forward.  Another moment, and the lighthouse wagon was splashing and rattling through the pouring rain along the road leading to Denboro.

CHAPTER XV

The voyage of the Daisy M.

Denboro is many long miles from Eastboro, and the road, even in the best of weather, is not a good one.  It winds and twists and climbs and descends through woods and over hills.  There are stretches of marshy hollows where the yellow clay needs but a little moistening to become a paste which sticks to wheels and hoofs and makes traveling, even behind a young and spirited horse, a disheartening progress.

Joshua was neither young nor spirited.  And the weather could not have been much worse.  The three days’ storm had soaked everything, and the clay-bottomed puddles were near kin to quicksands.  As the lighthouse wagon descended the long slope at the southern end of the village and began the circle of the inner extremity of Eastboro Back Harbor, Seth realized that his journey was to be a hard one.  The rain, driven by the northeast wind, came off the water in blinding gusts, and the waves in the harbor were tipped with white.  Also, although the tide was almost at its lowest, streaks of seaweed across the road showed where it had reached that forenoon, and prophesied even a greater flood that night.  He turned his head and gazed up the harbor to where it narrowed and became Pounddug Slough.  In the Slough, near its ocean extremity, his old schooner, the Daisy M., lay stranded.  He had not visited her for a week, and he wondered if the “spell of weather” had injured her to any extent.  This speculation, however, was but momentary.  The Daisy M. must look out for herself.  His business was to reach Judge Gould’s, in Denboro, before Mrs. Bascom and Bennie D. could arrange with that prominent citizen and legal light for the threatened divorce.

That they had started for Judge Gould’s he did not doubt for a moment.  “I shall seek the nearest lawyer,” Bennie D. had said.  And the judge was the nearest.  They must be going there, or why should they take that road?  Neither did he doubt now that their object was to secure the divorce.  How divorces were secured, or how long it took to get one, Seth did not know.  His sole knowledge on that subject was derived from the newspapers and comic weeklies, and he remembered reading of places in the West where lawyers with the necessary blanks in their pockets met applicants at the arrival of one train and sent them away, rejoicing and free, on the next.