ate for ten minutes before
opening a patent medicine circular. But, though mysteries were uncommon
enough in my life, I think I should have reached the solution of
this one in the next second--in fact, I had torn the end from the
envelope--when I was interrupted.

It was Captain Dean who interrupted me. He had evidently concluded his
conversation with the postmaster and now was bearing down majestically
upon me, like a ten thousand ton steamer on a porgie schooner.

"Hey, you--Ros!" he roared. He was at my elbow, but he roared just the
same. Skipper of a coaster in his early days, he had never outgrown the
habit of pitching his voice to carry above a fifty-mile gale. "Hey, Ros.
See here; I want to talk to you."

I did not want to talk with any one, particularly with him. He was the
individual who, according to Lute, had bracketed Mr. Rogers and myself
as birds of a feather, the remark which was primarily responsible for my
ill humor of the morning. If he had not said that, and if Lute had not
quoted the saying to me, I might have behaved less like a fool when that
automobile overtook me, I might not have given that young idiot, whose
Christian name it seemed was Victor, the opportunity to be smart at my
expense. That girl with the dark eyes might not have looked at me as if
I were a worm or a June bug. Confound her! what right had she to look at
me like that? Victor, or whatever his name was, was a cub and a cad and
as fresh as the new paint on Ben Small's lighthouse, but he had deigned
to speak. Whereas that girl--!

No, I did not want to talk with Jedediah Dean. However, he wanted to
talk to me, and what he wanted he usually got.

Captain Dean was one of Denboro's leading citizens. His parents had been
as poor as Job's turkey, but Jedediah had determined to get money and
now he had it. He was reputed to be worth "upwards of thirty thousand,"
owned acres and acres of cranberry swamps, and the new house he had just
built was almost as big as it was ugly, which is saying considerable. He
had wanted to be a deacon in the church and, though the church was by no
means so eager, deacon he became. He was an uncompromising Democrat, but
he had forced himself into the Board of Selectmen, every other member
a Republican. He was director in the Denboro bank, and it was town talk
that his most ardent desire at the present time was to see his daughter
Helen--Nellie, we all called her--married to George Taylor, cashier of
that