“I am sure we shall be the best of neighbors the rest of the summer.” The stranger smiled at the circle of eager, girlish faces around him. “If you will promise to keep me supplied with Virginia marmalade, put up by Aunty Welcome, as you call her, I will promise you a steady output of new magazines and books. Is it a bargain?”
“It is,” said the girls, resolutely, and then they remembered the mysterious parcels that Ruth had brought back from Eastport, and thanked him for their contents. But suddenly Crullers asked, in a gentle, interested way, the one question they had all avoided.
“What’s your name?”
“Smith,” replied the stranger, very simply, then he smiled around at them again in his whimsical, almost mischievous fashion, for there was frank disappointment on their faces. “There are a great many members of our family. I should have said Bold Daniel, or Blackbeard, should I not?”
“Well, we did rather hope you might turn out to be at least a smuggler,” Polly said, as she took the tea-tray from Ted, and set it down before their guest on a chair, for tea-tables existed not on Lost Island. “Won’t you try some of Aunty Welcome’s famous hermits, and sponge cake, and marmalade, and a cup of tea?”
For over an hour they entertained Mr. Smith of Smugglers’ Cove. He sat there with them on the porch till the sun went down, chatting happily, entertaining them with tales of adventure all over the world, and droll anecdotes that covered forty years of public life. He seemed to the girls, that first day, to be the most astonishing traveler they had ever met. He had served in many campaigns. He could tell them a story of the Civil War, and jump down to Chili with another tale about when he helped put through the first railroad that crossed the old trails of the Incas. Then before they could catch their breath, he was describing Egypt when the Suez Canal was being built, how one night he had watched the funeral of a little English baby, the child of one of the chief engineers.
“There was no coffin for it, no procession, nothing but the young, fair-haired English girl-mother standing on the shore, and a tall, bare-legged Arab, carrying the little form in his arms wrapped in the British flag, as he crossed over with the consul to the ‘Isle of the Sleepers,’ as the Arabs called their cemetery.”
“Oh, tell us some more,” pleaded Ruth and the rest, as he paused.
“Let me see,” he would lean back his head, and think of something else, his eyes twinkling with the pleasure of it all. “Did I tell you about the time I took tea with the king of Masailand in West Africa? Didn’t I? And he gave me a sack of purest ivory for a paper of pins?”
So he talked on, until the last rim of the sun dipped behind the purple hills in the west, and he started up.