She felt that sleep was far from her eyelids on this night; therefore she lit a candle and went into the storeroom to get something to read. She selected a much battered volume, printed in an early year of the nineteenth century, its title being:
LANDSMEN'S TALES:
Seafaring Yarns of a Lubber.
Louise became enthralled by the narratives of perilous adventure and odd happenings on shipboard which the author claimed to have himself observed. She read for an hour or more, while the sounds in the store below gradually ceased and she heard Cap'n Amazon close and lock the front door for the night.
Silence below. Outside the lap, lap, lap of the waves on the strand and the rising moan of the surf over Gulf Rocks.
Louise turned a page. She plunged into another yarn. Breathlessly and, almost fearfully she read it to the end—the very story of the murdered albatross and the sailors' superstitious belief in the bird's bad influence, as she had heard Cap'n Amazon relate it to Aunt Euphemia Conroth.
She laid down the book at last in amazement and confusion. There was no doubt now of Cap'n Amazon's mendacity. This book of nautical tales had been written and printed long before Amazon Silt was born!
And if the falseness of his wild narratives was established, was it a far cry to Betty Gallup's suspicions and accusations? What and who was this man, who called himself Amazon Silt who had taken Cap'n Abe's place in the store on the Shell Road?
Louise lay with wide-open eyes for a long time. Then she crept out of bed and turned the key in the lock of her door—the first time she had thought to do such a thing since her arrival at Cardhaven.