“I'll go, Daddy,” she said meekly, and went.
When Captain Dan descended to the lower floor he found Mr. Ginn in the library.
“Hello!” hailed the latter, “you look kind of set-up and sassy, seems to me. YOU ain't had nothin' to drink, have you?”
“Drink? What do you mean by that? Has anybody around here had anything to drink?”
“I don't know. Some of 'em act as if they had. When I came into the kitchen a spell ago I found my wife and Gertie dancin' like a couple of loons.”
“Dancin'?”
“Yes, sir, holdin' hands and hoppin' around like sand fleas in a clam bake. I asked 'em what set 'em goin' and they wouldn't tell me. I couldn't think of anything but liquor that would start Zuby Jane dancin'. I don't know's that would—I never tried it on her—but 'twas the only likely guess I could make.”
CHAPTER XV
Captain Dan was seated in his old chair, at his old desk, behind the counter of the Metropolitan Store. His pipe, the worn, charred briar that he had left in the drawer of that very desk when he started for the railway station and Scarford, was in his mouth. Over the counter, beyond the showcases and the tables with their piles of oilskins, mittens, sou'westers, and sweaters, through the panes of the big front windows, he could see the road, the main street of Trumet. The road was muddy, and the mud had frozen. Beyond the road, between the shops and houses on the opposite side, he saw the bare brown hills, the pond where the city people found waterlilies in the summer—the pond was now a glare of ice—the sand dunes, the beach, the closed and shuttered hotel and cottages, and, beyond these, the cold gray and white of the wintry sea rolling beneath a gloomy sky. To the average person the view would have been desolation itself. To Captain Dan it was a section of Paradise. It was the picture which had been in his mind for months. And here it was in reality, unchanged, unspoiled, a part of home, his home. And he, at last, was at home again.