"There!" says I, "in another week we'll be clear of sawdust, I do believe. The painters won't be so bad. And we've got on without any accidents, too, which is a miracle."
"You ought to knock wood when you say that, Skipper," says Jim Henry.
"I've knocked enough of it already—with my head," I told him. But I hadn't. At any rate the accident come, and not by reason of the buildin' on, either. It come right in the way of everyday trade, from where we wa'n't expectin' it. That's the way such things generally happen. A feller runs under a tree, so's to keep from gettin' rained on and catchin' cold, and then the tree's struck by lightnin'.
If I'd remembered what old Sylvanus Baxter said when they asked him to prove one of his fish statements, I'd have been a wiser man. Sylvanus was tellin' how many mack'rel him and his brother caught off Setucket P'int with a hand line, back when Methusalum was a child, or about then. Forty-eight barrels they caught, and it nigh filled the dory. One of the young city fellers who was listenin' undertook to doubt the yarn. He got a piece of paper and a pencil and proved that a dory wouldn't hold that many fish. Sylvanus shut him up in a hurry.
"Young man," he says, scornful, "where a human bein' is blessed with a memory same as I've got, proof's too unsartin to compare with it."
If I'd borne in mind what Sylvanus said and abided by it I might not have dropped the barrel of sugar on my starboard foot. I'd have been satisfied to remember my strength and not try to prove it by liftin' the said barrel off the tailboard of our delivery wagon.
However, I did try, and the result was that the barrel slipped when I'd got it 'most to the ground, and my foot went out of commission with a hurrah, so to speak.
Jim Henry come runnin' and him and the clerk loaded me into the wagon and carted me off to my rooms at the Poquit House. And there I stayed in dry dock for three weeks, while the doctor done his best to patch up my busted trotter and get me off the ways and into active service again.
He done his part all right. I was mendin' so far as the lower end of me was concerned, but my upper works and temper was gettin' more tangled and snarled every day. Too much company was the trouble. I had too many folks runnin' in to ask how I was gettin' on and to talk and talk and talk. Jim Henry he come, of course, to talk about the store; and Mary Blaisdell, to tell me how the post-office was doin'. I could stand them; fact is, Mary was a sort of soothin' sirup, with her pleasant face and calm, cheery voice. But the parson he come, to keep the spiritual part of me ready for whatever might happen; and the undertaker, to be sure he got the other part, if it did happen; and twenty-odd old maids and widows from sewin'-circle to talk about each other and church squabbles and the dreadful sufferin's and agonizin' deaths of their relations, who'd had accidents similar to mine.
They made me so fidgety and mad that the doctor noticed it. "What's troublin' you, Cap'n Snow?" he asked. "No new pains, I hope?"