eks--sloughed away. He was the simple,
tender-hearted, almost childish Cap'n Abe that she had met upon first
coming to Cardhaven.

Swiftly through her mind the incidents of that first night and morning
flashed. She remembered that he had prepared her--as he had prepared
his neighbors--for the coming of this wonderful Cap'n Amazon, whose
adventures he had related and whose praises he had sung for so many
years.

Cap'n Abe had taken advantage of Perry Baker's coming with Louise's
trunk to send off his own chest, supposedly filled with the clothes he
would need on a sea voyage.

Then, the house clear of the expressman and Louise safe in bed, the
storekeeper had proceeded to disguise himself as he had long planned to
do.

Not content with the shaving of his beard only, he had dyed his hair
and the sweeping piratical mustache left him. Walnut juice applied to
his face and body had given him the stain of a tropical sun. Of
course, this stain and the dye had to be occasionally renewed.

The addition of gold rings in his ears (long before pierced for the
purpose, of course) and the wearing of the colored handkerchief to
cover his bald crown completed a disguise that his own mother would
have found hard to penetrate.

Cap'n Abe was gone; Cap'n Amazon stood in his place.

To befool his niece was a small matter. At daybreak he had come to her
door and bidden Louise good-bye. But she had not seen him--only his
figure as he walked up the road in the fog. Cap'n Abe had, of course,
quickly made a circuit and come back to re-enter the house by the rear
door.

From that time--or from the moment Lawford Tapp had first seen him on
the store porch that morning--the storekeeper had played a huge game of
bluff. And what a game it had been!

In his character of Cap'n Amazon he had commanded the respect--even the
fear--of men who for years had considered Cap'n Abe a butt for their
poor jests. It was marvelous, Louise thought, when one came to think
of it.

And yet, not so marvelous after all, when she learned all that lay
behind the masquerade. There had always been, lying dormant in Cap'n
Abe's nature, characteristics that had never before found expression.

Much she learned on this evening at supper, and afterward when the
store had been closed and they were alone in the living-room.
Diddimus, who still had his doubts of the piratical looking captain,
lay in Louise's lap and purred loudly under the ministration of he