Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper.

by James A. Cooper.

CHAPTER I

A CHOICE

"Of course, my dear, there is n.o.body but your Aunt Euphemia for you to go to!"

"Oh, daddy-professor! n.o.body? Can we rake or sc.r.a.pe up no other relative on either side of the family who will take in poor little me for the summer? You will be home in the fall, of course."

"That is the supposition," Professor Grayling replied, his lips pursed reflectively. "No. Dear me! there seems n.o.body."

"But Aunt Euphemia!"

"I know, Lou, I know. She expects you, however. She writes----"

"Yes. She has it all planned," sighed Louise Grayling dejectedly.

"Every move at home or abroad Aunt Euphemia has mapped out for me. When I am with her I am a mere automaton--only unlike a real marionette I can feel when she pulls the strings!"

The professor shook his head. "There's--there's only your poor mother's half-brother down on the Cape."

"What half-brother?" demanded Louise with a quick smile that matched the professor's quizzical one.

"Why----Well, your mother, Lou, had an older half-brother, a Mr. Silt.

He keeps a store at Cardhaven. You know, I met your mother down that way when I was hunting seaweed for the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution. Your grandmother was a Bellows and her folks lived on the Cape, too. Her family has died out and your grandfather was dead before I married your mother. The half-brother, this Mr. Silt--Captain Abram Silt--is the only individual of that branch of the family left alive, I believe."

"Goodness!" gasped the girl. "What a family tree!"

Again the professor smiled whimsically. "Only a few of the branches.

But they all reach back to the first navigators of the world."

"The first navigators?"

"I do not mean to the Phoenicians," her father said. "I mean that the world never saw braver nor more worthy sailors than those who called the wind-swept hamlets of Cape Cod their home ports. The Silts were all master-mariners. This Captain Abe is a bachelor, I believe. You could not very well go there."

Louise sighed. "No; I couldn't go there--I suppose. I couldn't go there----" Her voice wandered off into silence. Then suddenly, almost explosively, it came back with the question: "Why couldn't I?"

"My dear Lou! What would your aunt say?" gasped the professor.

He was a tall, rather soldierly looking man--the result of military training in his youth--with a shock of perfectly white hair and a sweeping mustache that contrasted clearly with his pink, always cleanly shaven cheeks and chin. Without impressing the observer with his muscular power. Professor Grayling was a better man on a long hike and possessed more reserve strength than many more beefy athletes.

His daughter had inherited his springy carriage and even the clean pinkness of his complexion--always looking as though she were fresh from her shower. But there was nothing mannish about Lou Grayling--nothing at all, though she had other attributes of body and mind for which to thank her father.

They were the best of chums. No father and daughter could have trod the odd corners of the world these two had visited without becoming so closely attached to each other that their processes of thought, as well as their opinions in most matters, were almost in perfect harmony.

Although Mrs. Euphemia Conroth was the professor's own sister he could appreciate Lou's att.i.tude in this emergency. While the girl was growing up there had been times when it was considered best--usually because of her studies--for Lou to live with Aunt Euphemia. Indeed, that good lady believed it almost a sin that a young girl should attend the professor on any of his trips into "the wilds," as she expressed it. Aunt Euphemia ignored the fact that nowadays the railroad and telegraph are in Thibet and that turbines ply the headwaters of the Amazon.

Mrs. Conroth dwelt in Poughkeepsie--that half-way stop between New York and Albany; and she was as exclusive and opinionated a lady as might be found in that city of aristocracy and learning.

The college in the shadow of which Aunt Euphemia's dwelling basked, was that which had led the professor's daughter under the lady's sway.

Although the girls with whom Lou a.s.sociated within the college walls were up-to-the-minute--if not a little ahead of it--she found her aunt, like many of those barnacles clinging to the outer reefs of learning in college towns, was really a fossil. If one desires to meet the ultraconservative in thought and social life let me commend him to this stratum of humanity within stone's throw of a college. These barnacles like Aunt Euphemia are wedded to a manner of thought, gained from their own school experiences, that went out of fashion inside the colleges thirty years ago.

Originally, in Lou Grayling's case, when she first lived with Aunt Euphemia and was a day pupil at an exclusive preparatory school, it had been drilled into her by the lady that "children should be seen but not heard!" Later, although she acknowledged the fact that young girls were now taught many things that in Aunt Euphemia's maidenhood were scarcely whispered within hearing of "the young person," the lady was quite shocked to hear such subjects discussed in the drawing-room, with her niece as one of the discussers.

The structure of man and the lower animals, down to the number of their ribs, seemed no proper topic for light talk at an evening party. It made Aunt Euphemia gasp. Anatomy was Lou's hobby. She was an excellent and practical taxidermist, thanks to her father. And she had learned to name the bones of the human frame along with her multiplication table.

However, there was little about Louise Grayling to commend her among, for instance, the erudite of Boston. She was sweet and wholesome, as has been indicated. She had all the common sense that a pretty girl should have--and no more.

For she was pretty and, as well, owned that charm of intelligence without which a woman is a mere doll. Her father often reflected that the man who married Lou would be playing in great luck. He would get a _mate_.

So far as Professor Grayling knew, however (and he was as keenly observant of his daughter and her development as he was of scientific matters), there was as yet no such man in sight. Lou had escaped the usual boy-and-girl entanglements which fret the lives of many young folk, because of her a.s.sociation with her father in his journeys about the world. Being a perfectly normal, well-balanced girl, black boys, brown boys, yellow boys, or all the hues and shades of boys to be met with in those odd corners of the earth where the white man is at a premium, did not interest Lou Grayling in the least.

Without being ultraconservative like Aunt Euphemia, she was the sort of girl whom one might reckon on doing the sensible--perhaps the obvious--thing in almost any emergency. Therefore, after that single almost awed exclamation from the professor--his sole homage to Mrs.

Grundy--he added:

"My dear, do as you like. You are old enough and wise enough to choose for yourself--your aunt's opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Only, if you don't mind----"

"What is it, daddy-prof?" she asked him with a smile, yet still reflective.

"Why, if you don't mind," repeated the professor, "I'd rather you didn't inform me where you decide to spend your summer until I am off. I--I don't mind knowing after I am at sea--and your aunt cannot get at me."

She laughed at him gaily. "You take it for granted that I am going to Cape Cod," she cried accusingly.

"No--o. But I know how sorely I should be tempted myself, realizing your aunt's trying disposition."

"Perhaps this--this half-uncle may be quite as trying."

"Impossible!" was the father's rather emphatic reply.

"What?" she cried. "Traitor to the family fame?"

"You do not know Cape Cod folk. I do," he told her rather seriously.

"Some of them are quaint and peculiar. I suppose there are just as many down there with traits of extreme Yankee frugality as elsewhere in New England. But your mother's people, as I knew them, were the very salt of the earth. Our wanderings were all that kept you from knowing the old folk before they pa.s.sed away."

"You tempt me," was all Louise said. Then the conversation lapsed.

It was the day following that the professor was to go to Boston preparatory to sailing. At the moment of departure his daughter, smiling, tucked a sealed note into his pocket.

"Don't open it, daddy-prof, till you are out of sight of Coha.s.set Rocks,"

she said. "Then you will not know where I am going to spend the time of your absence until it is too late--either to oppose or to advise."

"You can't worry me," he told her, with admiration in his glance. "I've every confidence in you, my dear. Have a good time if you can."

She watched him down the long platform between the trains. When she saw him a.s.sisted into the Pullman by the porter she turned with a little sigh, and walked up the rise toward Forty-second Street. She could almost wish she were going with him, although seaweed and mollusk gathering was a messy business, and the vessel he sailed in was an ancient converted coaster with few comforts for womenkind. Louise Grayling had been hobbled by city life for nearly a year now and she began to crave new scenes.

There were some last things to do at the furnished apartment they were giving up. Some trunks were to go to the storehouse. Her own baggage was to be tagged and sent to the Fall River boat.

For, spurred by curiosity as well as urged by a desire to escape Aunt Euphemia for a season, Louise was bent upon a visit to Cape Cod. At least, she would learn what manner of person her only other living relative was--her mother's half-brother, Captain Abram Silt.