When he smiled at her and his eyes crinkled at the corners, he was as kindly of expression, she thought, as Cap'n Abe himself. And he was a much better looking man than the brother who had gone away.
"Cap'n Amazon," she said to him, "I believe you must be just full of stories of adventure and wonderful happenings by sea and land. Uncle Abram said you had been everywhere."
Cap'n Amazon seemed to take a long breath, then cleared his throat, and said:
"I've been pretty nigh everywhere. Seen some funny corners of the world, too, Louise."
"You must tell me about your adventures," she said. "Your brother told me that you ran away to sea when you were only twelve years old and sailed on a long whaling voyage."
"Yep. South Sea Belle. Some old hooker, she was," said Cap'n Amazon briskly. "We was out three year and come home with our hold bustin' with ile, plenty of baleen, some sperm, and a lump of ambergris as big as a nail keg—or pretty nigh."
Right then and there he launched into relating how the wondrous find of ambergris came to be made, neglecting his breakfast to do so. He told it so vividly that Louise was enthralled. The picture of the whaling bark beating up to the dead and festering leviathan lying on the surface of the ocean to which the exploding gases of decomposition had brought the hulk, lived in her mind for days. The mate of the South Sea Belle, believing the creature had died of the disease supposedly caused by the growth of the ambergris in its intestines, had insisted upon boarding the carcass. Driving away the clamorous and ravenous sea fowl, he had dug down with his blubber-spade into the vitals of the whale and recovered the gray, spongy, ill-smelling mass which was worth so great a sum to the perfumer.
"'Twas a big haul—one o' the biggest lumps o' ambergris ever brought into the port of New Bedford," concluded Cap'n Amazon. "Helped make the owners rich, and the Old Man, too. Course, I got my sheer; but a boy's sheer on a whaler them days wouldn't buy him no house and lot. So I went to sea again."
"You must have been at sea almost all your life, Cap'n Amazon."
"Pretty nigh. I ain't never lazed around on shore when there was a berth in a seaworthy craft to be had for the askin'. I let Abe do that," he added, in what Louise thought was a rather scornful tone.