“Was she?”
“Why not?”
“Well, would any one else that was raised around here and could row a boat out to the lighthouse-point and swim two miles back, as easy as you could walk across the street, upset in ten feet of water and get drowned, if they didn’t want to?”
“You think Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ drowned herself?” I exclaimed in horror. The thought, freighted with terrible responsibility, was too dreadful to accept.
“She was going to get turned out of her house, wasn’t she? And she wasn’t on speaking terms with a town that she would have to accept the crust of charity from. There’s some as says she was crazy, and that was why she fell out of her boat, but me, I claim it was the most sensible thing she ever done.”
The subject had become so depressing that I was more than ready to discontinue it. Jasper was restlessly picking up our bags.
“Let’s go,” said he. “How about the key?”
“We’ll have to go to Judge Bell and get it,” I was beginning, but Alf interrupted me.
“Oh, it ain’t locked! Don’t worry, nobody would steal anything out of that house; they wouldn’t go near it.” He wished us good-night in a tone that suggested that it was nothing to him if we chose to be murdered in our beds, but kindly insisted on lending us matches and candles and a can of kerosene.
We went happily up the boardwalk, arm in arm, and in five minutes turned into our own yard and opened the front door.