Jack flushed slightly, and threw his shoulders back.
“I had forgotten that,” he said quietly. “I remember, though, that it was you who found Dad. You didn’t see anybody about, of course?”
Cap’n Crumbie shook his head.
“And I don’t know as they mightn’t have suspected me, if it hadn’t so happened that the new Baptist parson was with me, and they had to take his word.”
“Well, what’s your theory of it, Cap’n?” Jack asked.
Cap’n Crumbie paused in his sentry-go to stuff shreds of tobacco into the much blackened bowl of his old brier pipe and then, with deftness born of practice extending over many years on the exposed wharf, struck a match, cupped it in both hands under the lee of a broad shoulder turned away from the breeze, and puffed contentedly for a moment.
“Well, if I don’t know what happened that night, there ain’t no one as does,” he said at length, with a slightly judicial air. He had told the story a good many times, not because there was anything specially stirring about it, but because he was directly concerned and because it happened to be the nearest approach to an adventure ever happening to him in all his three score years—if one excepted the time when he fell overboard from his sail-boat and, after a few thrilling seconds, was ignominiously pulled back to safety by one of his passengers, who passed a boat-hook through his trousers. “Your father and Simon Barker were partners, as you know, as fish-merchants. ’Twas a pity Samuel Holden ever joined up with a feller like Barker, because nobody ever did any good harnessed to a mean cuss like that. They started in a small way, with one schooner, the Grace and Ella. There she is, now, lying up against Barker’s wharf. And many a thousand-dollars’ worth of fish has been landed from over her side since then. At the time I’m speaking of, she’d come in with a big haul, that fetched high prices. A day or two after that the gale sprang up. And it was a storm. Never since I was in the Indian Ocean—umph—er—er—”
Cap’n Crumbie coughed discreetly, remembering that his audience was “home folks,” and then resumed quite without embarrassment:
“Well, as I was saying, it was a gale that fair knocked Greenport galley-endwise. It started all of a sudden, raining cats and dogs, and the wind was so strong you couldn’t stand up. We lost two of our best fishing-vessels that day; windows were blown in and roofs ripped off; and a bunch o’ little sail-boats lying at their moorings were blown clean out to sea. Some of ’em never were found again. One or two got smashed up on the rocks. One of ’em went ’way up ’round Indian Head, drifted up the tide way o’ the Sangus River, and lodged on the sand-dunes there. Then the sea piled the sand up, changed the course o’ the river, and she’s been left high and dry ever since.”