Not content with the shaving of his beard only, he had dyed his hair and the sweeping piratical mustache left him. Walnut juice applied to his face and body had given him the stain of a tropical sun. Of course, this stain and the dye had to be occasionally renewed.
The addition of gold rings in his ears (long before pierced for the purpose, of course) and the wearing of the colored handkerchief to cover his bald crown completed a disguise that his own mother would have found hard to penetrate.
Cap'n Abe was gone; Cap'n Amazon stood in his place.
To befool his niece was a small matter. At daybreak he had come to her door and bidden Louise good-bye. But she had not seen him—only his figure as he walked up the road in the fog. Cap'n Abe had, of course, quickly made a circuit and come back to re-enter the house by the rear door.
From that time—or from the moment Lawford Tapp had first seen him on the store porch that morning—the storekeeper had played a huge game of bluff. And what a game it had been!
In his character of Cap'n Amazon he had commanded the respect—even the fear—of men who for years had considered Cap'n Abe a butt for their poor jests. It was marvelous, Louise thought, when one came to think of it.
And yet, not so marvelous after all, when she learned all that lay behind the masquerade. There had always been, lying dormant in Cap'n Abe's nature, characteristics that had never before found expression.
Much she learned on this evening at supper, and afterward when the store had been closed and they were alone in the living-room. Diddimus, who still had his doubts of the piratical looking captain, lay in Louise's lap and purred loudly under the ministration of her gentle hand, while Cap'n Abe talked.
It was a story that brought to the eyes of the sympathetic girl the sting of tears as well as bubbling laughter to her lips. And in it all she found something almost heroic as well as ridiculous.
"My mother marked me," said Cap'n Abe. "Poor mother! I was born with her awful horror of the ravenin' sea as she saw the Bravo an' Cap'n Josh go down. I knew it soon—when I was only a little child. I knew I was set apart from other Silts, who had all been seafarin' men since the beginnin' of time.