f themselves and I am having a most enjoyable
time."

Cap'n Abe was surely much older than her daddy-prof! It puzzled her.
It troubled her. There was not a moment of that day when it was not
the uppermost thought in her mind.

People came in from all around to read Cap'n Abe's letter and to
congratulate Cap'n Amazon and Louise that the _Curlew_ was safe. The
captain took the matter as coolly as he did everything else.

Louise watched him, trying to fathom his manner and the mystery about
him. Yet, when the solution of the problem was developed, she was most
amazed by the manner in which her eyes were opened.

Supper time was approaching, and the cooler evening breeze blew in
through the living-room windows. Relieved for the moment from his
store tasks, Cap'n Amazon appeared, rubbing his hands cheerfully, and
briskly approached old Jerry's cage as he chirruped to the bird.

"Well! well! And how's old Jerry been to-day?" Louise heard him say.
Then: "Hi-mighty! What's this?"

Louise glanced in from the kitchen. She saw him standing before the
cage, his chin sunk on his breast, the tears trickling down his
mahogany face.

That hard, stern visage, with its sweeping piratical mustache and the
red bandana above it, was a most amazing picture of grief.

"Oh! What is it?" cried the girl, springing to his side.

He pointed with shaking index finger to the bird within the cage.

"Dead!" he said brokenly, "Dead, Niece Louise! Poor old Jerry's
dead--and him and me shipmates for so many, many years."

"Oh!" screamed the girl, grasping his arm. "_You are Cap'n Abe_!"

CHAPTER XXVII

SARGASSO

After all, when she considered it later, Louise wondered only that she
had not seen through the masquerade long before.

From the beginning--the very first night of her occupancy of the
pleasant chamber over the store on the Shell Road--she should have
understood the mystery that had had the whole neighborhood by the ears
during the summer.

She, more than anybody else, should have seen through Cap'n Abe's
masquerade. Louise had been in a position, she now realized, to have
appreciated the truth.

"You are Cap'n Abe," she told him, and he did not deny it. Sadly he
looked at the dead canary in the bottom of the cage, and wiped his eyes.

"Poor Jerry!" her uncle said, and in that single phrase all the outer
husk of the rough and ready seaman--the character he had assumed in
playing his part for so many we