"Your wife's credit seems to be good," Cap'n Amazon returned firmly. "But here's what I find here: 'Don't trust Milt Baker for Brown Mule 'cause Mandy makes him pay cash for his tobacker and rum. We don't sell no rum.' That's enough, young man."
Milt might have tried to argue the case with Cap'n Abe; but not with Cap'n Amazon. There was something in the steady look of the latter that caused the shiftless clam digger to dig down into his pocket for the nickel, pay it over, and walk grumblingly out of the store.
"Does beat all what a fool a woman will be," commented Cap'n Amazon, rather enigmatically; only Louise, who heard him, realized fully what his thought was. Jealous and hard-working Mandy Baker had chosen for herself a handicap in the marriage game.
CHAPTER X
WHAT LOUISE THINKS
Sunday morning such a hush pervaded the store on the Shell Road, and brooded over its surroundings, as Lou Grayling had seldom experienced save in the depths of the wilderness.
She beheld a breeze-swept sea from her window with no fishing boats going out. There was nobody on the clam flats, although the tide was just right at dawn. The surfman from the patrol station beyond The Beaches paced to the end of his beat dressed in his best, like a man merely taking a Sunday morning stroll.
The people she saw seemed to be changed out of their everyday selves. Not only were they in Sabbath garb, but they had on their Sabbath manner. Even to Milt Baker, the men were cleanly shaven and wore fresh cotton shirts of their wives' laundering.
Cap'n Amazon appeared from his "cabin" when the first church bells began to ring, arrayed in a much wrinkled but very good suit of "go ashore" clothes of blue, which were possibly those he had worn when he arrived at the store on the Shell Road. He wore a hard, glazed hat of an old-fashioned naval shape and, instead of the usual red bandana, he wore a black silk handkerchief tied about his head.
Just why he always kept his crown thus swathed, Louise was very desirous of knowing. Yet she did not feel like asking him such a very personal question. Had it been Cap'n Abe she would not for a moment have hesitated. Louise had heard of men being scalped by savages and she was almost tempted to believe that this had happened to Cap'n Amazon in one of his wild encounters.