"'But I tell you, Sam,' said Abner, a little querulously, 'I didn't come here to marry one of them women. I didn't start on this trip to make fast to the fust female person I might fall in with. I set out on a week's cruise, and I want to see a lot of them afore I make a ch'ice.'
"'I tell you, cap'n,' said Sam, very earnestly, 'it won't do. You might hang round Thompsontown for a year, and you wouldn't find any two such women as them two. Here they are, two kinds to pick from: one of them as ripe as a peach, and the other like a cross between a cricket and a blossom. And you've got no time to fool away. When the sun goes down you've got to sail back to Thompsontown, and then one will go one way and the other another, and where the minister will go to, nobody knows. They'll all be scattered and out of sight, and this glorious chance you've got might as well be at the bottom of the sea. Now, cap'n, I tell you, this thing that's right afore you is what you come for. Jes you listen to what I say to you: you go to that Mrs. Sickles and let her see how you're standin' and what your course is. She's no fool, and she can see the sense of gettin' over a sandbar at high tide jes as well as you can.'
"Captain Abner hesitated a moment. 'She's a mighty fine woman, Sam,' said he, 'but if I go and set the case afore her, and she agrees to ship with me, then I can't ask the other one, and there might as well be no other one; and she's as pert a little clipper as ever I seed, Sam, and she likes sailin', that she does.'
"'Now don't you worry about that,' said Sam. 'You jes say all you've got to say to her, and hear all she's got to say, but don't sign no papers and take her aboard until you talk to that other girl. Now hurry up, and walk along the beach a little further off.'
"Without waiting for an answer, Sam Twitty galloped away, or that was what he would have done had he been a sheep-dog. He darted in between Mrs. Sickles and her companions; he turned her down the beach; he talked to her in rapid snaps about the sea, the sky, the sand, and before she knew it he had driven her alongside of Captain Abner. Then, with what might have been compared to a bark of satisfaction, he bounced away to join the others, who were looking for shells.
"In about ten minutes Sam Twitty's port eye told him that Captain Abner and the toll-gate woman were approaching, but in Abner there were signs of a disposition to fall back. In an instant he had bounded between them and was showing shells to the widow. Then, letting her go on by herself, he turned sharply upon Abner.
"'Well,' said he, their heads close together, 'what did she say? Is she all right?'
"Captain Abner threw a glance over the water as if his soul were yearning for the fancied possibilities of Thompsontown. 'Oh, it's all right enough, so far as she counts,' said he. 'I went straight at it, and put the whole thing afore her. I told her about the house and the two parts to it and what they was for, and she said that was charmin'. And I told her about the king conch-shell and the gilded idol, and she said she thought either one of them would be jes lovely, and nothin', she thought, could be better on mantelpieces than gilded idols and king conch-shells. And everything else was jes as slick and smooth as if she was slidin' off the stocks. She's good-lookin' enough, Sam, but she ain't got no mind, and I didn't fix up that house, and bother myself year in and year out a-gettin' it all right, to take it and give it to a woman what's got no mind. She'd be jes as well satisfied to see me a-settin' up on the mantelpiece as if the gilded idol or the king conch-shell was there.'
"'And she don't suit you?' asked Sam, eagerly.
"'No, sir,' replied the other; 'she don't suit.'