If Elsie noticed this sudden change she said nothing. There might have been some comment by the others, had not a new sensation so occupied their minds as to shut out everything else. This sensation was caused by Josiah Bartlett, who ran away one night, with his belongings tied up in a brown paper parcel, leaving a note saying that he had gone to enlist in the Navy and wasn't coming back any more.
There were lively times the next morning when the note was found. Captain Perez was for harnessing up immediately and starting off to find the lost one, hit or miss. Captain Eri soon showed him the folly of this proceeding and, instead, hurried to the railway station and sent a telegram describing the fugitive to the conductor of the Boston train. It caught the conductor at Sandwich, and the local constable at Buzzard's Bay caught the boy. Josiah was luxuriously puffing a five-cent cigar in the smoking car, and it was a crest-fallen and humiliated prodigal that, accompanied by the a fore-mentioned constable, returned to Orham that night.
But the stubbornness remained, and the next day Perez sought Captain Eri in a troubled frame of mind.
“Eri,” he said dejectedly, “I don't know what I'm goin' to do with that boy. He's too many for ME, that boy is. Seems he's been plannin' this runnin' away bus'ness for more 'n a month; been doin' errands and odd jobs 'round town and savin' up his money on purpose. Says he won't go back to school again, no matter what we do to him, and that he's goin' to git into the Navy if it takes ten year. He says he'll run away again fust chance he gits, and he WILL, too. He's got the sperit of the Old Scratch in him, and I can't git it out. I'm clean discouraged and wore out, and I know that he'll do somethin' pretty soon that 'll disgrace us all.”
“Humph!” exclaimed his friend. “Stuffy as all that, is he? You don't say! He ain't a bad boy, that is a REEL bad boy, either.”
“No, that's jest it. He ain't reel bad—yit. But he will be if he ain't fetched up pretty sudden. 'Course, I know what he needs is to be made to mind fust, and then preached to afterwards. And I know that nat'rally I'm the one that ought to do it, but I jest can't—there! If I should start out to give him the dressin' down he needs, I'd be thinkin' of his mother every minute, and how I promised to treat him gentle and not be cross to him. But SOMETHIN'S got to be done, and if you can help me out any way I'll never forgit it, Eri.”
Captain Eri scratched his chin. “Humph!” he grunted reflectively. “He couldn't git into the Navy, he's too young. More likely to be a stowaway on a merchantman and then roustabout on a cattle boat, or some such thing. Even if he lied 'bout his age and did git to be a sort of a ship's boy on a sailin' vessel, you and me know what that means nowadays. I presume likely 'twould end in his bein' killed in some rumshop scrimmage later on. Let—me—see. Bound to be a sailor, is he?”
“He's dead sot on it.”
“More fool he. Comes from readin' them ridic'lous story books, I s'pose. He ain't been on the water much sence he's been down here, has he?”
“Not more 'n once or twice, except in a dory goin' to the beach, or somethin' like that.”