“No, I’ve seen enough of it. That young fellow is right in not selling, and if he can’t sell, I won’t be fool enough to drink.”
“Come, come!” said a little voice behind him.
“Yes, Amy; I’m going,” and out of the store he went. Baggs was amazed. He could not understand it.
“Well, if that ain’t queer!” he muttered. He began to wonder if the recent scene were real, whether it might not have been a dream. There was Walter, though, now almost out of sight; and the young man was moving in the same direction, his coat–skirts still clutched by Amy. These three were substantial witnesses to the reality of the affair; and Baggs, wiping his forehead with a very red, and a very dirty handkerchief, turned toward his desk in what was strictly the “office” part of the shanty.
Walter did not intend to take the road he was now traveling, but when he left Baggs, he was feeling so intensely, that the matter of a road was too trivial to be noticed. The road in which he was walking led him to The Harbor; and from this village, he could reach his uncle’s, though his walk would be a long one.
“I have started,” he reflected, “and I might as well keep on. Besides, if I turn back to take the right road, I shall have to pass Baggs’ office, and I don’t want to go near that rascal. I will walk a mile to avoid him.” He tramped forward with a kind of fierce energy, busily thinking.
“The idea! Wanting to exalt Uncle Boardman to a pinnacle of wealth! And he has been constantly befooling him. He has been pretending to buy up woodland far and near; and I don’t know but that he has bought it, in one way, but I don’t believe he has paid for it. Aunt Lydia saw through him all the time, and she was the sharpest of the lot. Then that liquor business! Wasn’t he cunning, giving away his whiskey! Well, he found one person who would neither sell, nor give for him.”
So intensely was Walter thinking, he did not notice how rapidly he was passing through the little fishing–village. There were not more than forty houses at The Harbor, and these were located anywhere along the crooked line of the one narrow street. The neighborhood was very rocky, and in and out among the ledges, wound this single street. Some of the houses were very old, and their roofs were patched with moss. Planted near the ledges, these ancient relics of domestic architecture seemed more like masses of lichen, that had fastened on the ledges, becoming a part of them; and resolute to maintain their rocky anchorage as long as the rough sea winds, and the driving rains, would let them. The village had a small store, whose proprietor considered himself as a dangerous competitor of Boardman Blake, and a box schoolhouse, capped with a rude little belfry, which never had entertained a bell as its guest. It had also an unpainted “hall,” where one evening a dance might be pounded out by the vigorous feet of the young men and women of the village; the next evening might witness an auction; and if the third evening belonged to Sunday, some kind of a religious service might be held there. These three public buildings, the store, the schoolhouse, the hall, Walter had passed. Chancing to look up, he said, “I am almost through the village. I have been so mad, I have made pretty quick time; and there is the road that goes up to Uncle Boardman’s; and—and—there’s the ‘Crescent’! I have a great mind to go home that way, by the Crescent.”
The Crescent was a peculiarity of rock and sand in the harbor. If it had been simply a shoal of sand, though shaped like a young moon this year, the shifting tides every day, the great storms of spring or autumn, would have worked it over into something very unlike a young moon another year. There were nubs of rocks at either end, and ledges were scattered along the sides of this marine scimeter, so that a measure of the restless sand was retained; and year after year, the Crescent kept substantially its form.
At low tide, the Crescent could be easily reached by any pedestrian. One in passing from The Harbor to Boardman Blake’s, could leave the road, and at low tide cross over to the Crescent, pass along its ledges and sand, and leaving it, at its easterly extremity, regain the land without wetting the feet. This course would carry one not far from the lane that straggled from the life saving station up to Boardman Blake’s; and although a much longer route than by the road, it had its attractions for those who liked to see the surf tumble on the rocks. Walter was of this number, and instead of following any farther the crooked street that wound among the ledges, and then curved toward Boardman Blake’s store, he digressed at a point opposite the Crescent; and he took the longer, but more romantic way home.