Read Ebook: Cap'n Abe Storekeeper: A Story of Cape Cod by Cooper James A

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Ebook has 1840 lines and 75550 words, and 37 pages

Soon the horses shacked out of town. The sandy road wandered through the pine woods where the hot June sunshine extracted the scent of balsam until its strength was almost overpowering. Louise, alone in the interior of the old coach, found herself pitching and tossing about as though in a heavy sea.

"It is fortunate I am a good sailor," she told herself, somewhat ruefully.

The driver was a large man in a yellow linen duster. He was not especially communicative--save to his horses. He told them frankly what he thought of them on several occasions! But "city folks" were evidently no novelty for him. As he put Louise and her baggage into the vehicle he had asked:

"Who you cal'latin' to stop with, miss?"

"I am going to Mr. Abram Silt's," Louise had told him.

"Oh! Cap'n Abe. Down on the Shell Road. I can't take ye that fur--ain't allowed to drive beyond the tavern. But 'tain't noways a fur walk from there."

He expressed no curiosity about her, or her business with the Shell Road storekeeper. That surprised Louise a little. She had presumed all these people would display Yankee curiosity.

It was not a long journey by stage, for which she was thankful. The noonday sun was hot and the interior of the turnout soon began to take on the semblance of a bake-oven. They came out at last on a wind-swept terrace and she gained her first unobstructed view of the ocean.

She had always loved the sea--its wideness, its mystery, its ever changing face. She watched the sweep of a gull following the crested windrow of the breakers on a near-by reef, busy with his fishing. All manner of craft etched their spars and canvas on the horizon, only bluer than the sea itself. Inshore was a fleet of small fry--catboats, sloops, dories under sail, and a smart smack or two going around to Provincetown with cargoes from the fish pounds.

"I shall like it," she murmured after a deeper breath.

The coach stopped before the post-office, and Louise got out briskly with her bag. The driver, backing down from his seat, said to her:

"If ye wait till I git out the mail I'll drive ye inter the tavern yard in style. I bait the horses there."

"Oh, I'll walk," she told him brightly. "I can get dinner there, I suppose?"

"Warn't they expectin' you at Cap'n Abe's?" the stage driver asked. "I want to know! Oh, yes. You can buy your dinner at the tavern. But 'tain't a long walk to Cap'n Abe's. Not fur beyond the Mariner's Chapel."

Louise thanked him. A young man was coming down the steps of the post-office. He was a more than ordinarily good-looking young fellow, deeply tanned, with a rather humorous twist to his shaven lips, and with steady blue eyes. He was dressed in quite common clothing: the jersey, high boots, and sou'wester of a fisherman.

He looked at Louise, but not offensively. He did not remove his hat as he spoke.

"I heard Noah say you wished to go to Cap'n Abe's store," he observed with neither an assumption of familiarity nor any bucolic embarrassment. "I am bound that way myself."

"Thank you!" she said with just enough dignity to warn him to keep his distance if he chanced to be contemplating anything familiar. "But I shall dine at the hotel first."

A brighter color flooded into his cheeks and Louise felt that she might have been too sharp with him. She mended this by adding:

"You may tell me how to get to the Shell Road and Mr. Silt's, if you will be so kind."

He smiled at that. Really, he was an awfully nice-looking youth! She had no idea that these longshore fishermen would be so gentlemanly and so good looking.

"Oh, you can't miss it. Take the first left-hand street, and keep on it. Cap'n Abe's store is the only one beyond the Mariner's Chapel."

"Thank you," she said again and mounted the broad steps of the Inn. The young fellow hesitated as though he were inclined to enter too. But when Louise reached the piazza and glanced quickly down at him, he was moving on.

The cool interior of a broad hall with a stairway mounting out of it and a screened dining-room at one side, welcomed the girl. A bustling young woman in checked gingham, which fitted her as though it were a mold for her rather plump figure, met the visitor.

"How-do!" she said briskly. "Goin' to stop?"

"Only for dinner," Louise said, smiling--and when she smiled her gray eyes made friends.

"Almost over. But I'll run an' tell the cook to dish you up something hot. Come right this way an' wash. I'll fix you a table where it's cool. This is 'bout the first hot day we've had."

She showed the visitor into the dressing-room and then bustled away. Later she hovered about the table where Louise ate, the other boarders having departed.

"My name's Gusty Durgin," she volunteered. "I reckon you're one o' them movin' picture actresses they say are goin' to work down to The Beaches this summer."

"What makes you think so?" asked Louise, somewhat amused.

"I'm not sure that I do," laughed Louise.

"Grayling."

"'Grayling'! Ain't that pretty?" Gusty Durgin gave an envious sigh. "Is it your honest to goodness, or just your fillum name?"

"My 'honest to goodness,'" the visitor confessed, bubbling with laughter.

"Land sakes! I should have to change mine all right. The kids at school useter call me 'Dusty Gudgeon.' Course, my right name's Augusta; but nobody ever remembers down here on the Cape to call anybody by such a long name. Useter be a boy in our school who was named 'Christopher Columbus George Washington Marquis de Lafayette Gallup.' His mother named him that. But everybody called him 'Lafe'--after Lafayette, ye see.

"Land sakes! I should just have to change my name if I acted in the pictures. Your complexion's real, too, ain't it?" pursued this waitress with histrionic ambitions. "Real pretty, too, if 'tis high colored. I expect you have to make up for the pictures, just the same."

"I suppose I should. I believe it is always necessary to accentuate the lights and shadows for the camera."

"The Beaches?"

"That's where you'll work. At the Bozewell house. Swell bungalow. All the big bugs live along The Beaches."

"I am not sure just how long I shall stay," confessed Louise Grayling; "but I know I am going to like it."

CAP'N ABE

"And they did," rejoined Cap'n Joab Beecher, "if they seen ha'f what they tell about."

There was an uncertain, troubled movement among Cap'n Abe's hearers. Even the fishfly stopped droning. Cap'n Beecher looked longingly through the doorway from which the sea could be observed as well as a strip of that natural breakwater called "The Neck," a barrier between the tumbling Atlantic and the quiet bay around which the main village of Cardhaven was set.

All the idlers in the store on this June afternoon were not natives. There were several young fellows from The Beaches--on the Shell Road to which Cap'n Abe's store was a fixture. In sight of The Beaches the wealthy summer residents had built their homes--dwellings ranging in architectural design from the mushroom-roofed bungalow to a villa in the style of the Italian Renaissance.

"The deck load went o' course; and about ev'rything else was cleaned off the decks that warn't bolted to 'em. The seas rose up and picked off the men, one after t'other, like a person'd clean off a beach plum bush."

"I shouldn't wonder," spoke up Cap'n Beecher, "if we seen some weather 'fore morning."

He was squinting through the doorway at an azure and almost speckless sky. There was an uneasy shuffling of boots. One of the boys from The Beaches giggled. Cap'n Abe--and the fishfly--boomed on together, the storekeeper evidently visualizing the scene he narrated and not the half-lighted and goods-crowded shop. At its best it was never well illumined. Had the window panes been washed there was little chance of the sunshine penetrating far save by the wide open door. On either hand as one entered were the rows of hanging oilskins, storm boots, miscellaneous clothing and ship chandlery that made up only a part of Cap'n Abe's stock.

There were blue flannel shirts dangling on wooden hangers to show all their breadth of shoulder and the array of smoked-pearl buttons. Brown and blue dungaree overalls were likewise displayed--grimly, like men hanging in chains. At the end of one row of these quite ordinary habiliments was one dress shirt with pleated bosom and cuffs as stiff as a board. Lawford Tapp sometimes speculated on that shirt--how it chanced to be in Cap'n Abe's stock and why it had hung there until the flies had taken title to it!

Centrally located was the stove, its four heavily rusted legs set in a shallow box which was sometimes filled with fresh sawdust. The stovepipe, guyed by wires to the ceiling, ran back to the chimney behind Cap'n Abe.

He stood at the one space that was kept cleared on his counter, hairy fists on the brown, hacked plank--the notches of the yard-stick and fathom-stick cut with a jackknife on its edge--his pale eyes sparkling as he talked.

"There she wallered," went on the narrator of maritime disaster, "her cargo held together by rotting sheathing and straining ribs. She was wrung by the seas like a dishrag in a woman's hands. She no longer mounted the waves; she bored through 'em. 'Twas a serious time--to hear Cap'n Am'zon tell it."

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