“I sent in my resignation four days ago. Nobody knows it, except you, not even Issy, but the new depot master for East Harniss will be here to take my place on the mornin' of the twelfth, that's two days off.”
“Why! Why! SOL!”
“Yes. Keep mum about it. I'll—I'll let you know what I decide to do. I ain't settled it myself yet. Good-by, Barzilla.”
CHAPTER XVII
ISSY'S REVENGE
The following morning, at nine o'clock, Issy McKay sat upon the heap of rusty chain cable outside the blacksmith's shop at Denboro, reading, as usual, a love story. Issy was taking a “day off.” He had begged permission of Captain Sol Berry, the permission had been granted, and Issy had come over to Denboro, the village eight miles above East Harniss, in his “power dory,” or gasoline boat, the Lady May. The Lady May was a relic of the time before Issy was assistant depot master, when he gained a precarious living by quahauging, separating the reluctant bivalve from its muddy house on the bay bottom with an iron rake, the handle of which was forty feet long. Issy had been seized with a desire to try quahauging once more, hence his holiday. The rake was broken and he had put in at Denboro to have it fixed. While the blacksmith was busy, Issy laboriously spelled out the harrowing chapters of “Vivian, the Shop Girl; or Lord Lyndhurst's Lowly Love.”
A grinning, freckled face peered cautiously around the corner of the blacksmith's front fence. Then an overripe potato whizzed through the air and burst against the shop wall a few inches from the reader's head. Issy jumped.
“You—you everlastin' young ones, you!” he shouted fiercely. “If I git my hands onto you, you'll wish you'd—I see you hidin' behind that fence.”
Two barefooted little figures danced provokingly in the roadway and two shrill voices chanted in derision: