The truth was—and Pearl Higgins, his wife, could never quite forget it or forgive it—Elmer had once shipped before the mast on Hat Tyler's ships; and Hat was not likely to forget it either. Rumor had it that Hat and Elmer had been as thick as thieves at one time, and that it was You-tickle-me-and-I'll-kiss-you between them then. But if such was the case they had later had a falling out, and Elmer had gone one way and Hat another.
"As a matter of fact I was more glad than sorry at what took place," Hat now continued. "That cargo of paving stones up and shifted and started her in a new place. She was leaking like a sieve. That little rat of an underwriter said to me: 'If I were you, as soon as I got out of sight of land I would turn round and kick the stern off her with a tap of my foot.' 'Maybe I will, for all you know,' I said. I'd like to see them bamboozle me!"
"Trust you, Hat!" said Lena Kidder in a voice of admiration.
"And so Elmer Higgins has the cast-iron nerve to say that he laughed at me to my face, does he?" continued Mrs. Tyler. "Well, he lies when he says it."
So the lie was passed, and hostilities began; for before night word came to Pearl Higgins that Hat Tyler was back in town running down her husband for his part in the rescue. Elmer's wife, a dark thin-featured woman, had felt all along that Elmer had never been able to shake off vestiges of that time when he and Hat had been so kind of hand-in-glove; and she had privately determined to put the woman at a safe distance once and for all.
"The long and short of it is," she said grimly when Elmer had come home and spread his navigation books on the kitchen table "she's round town calling you a liar; and now I suppose you'll be just meek enough to put up with it."
Elmer took off his spectacles and rubbed his brow thoughtfully.
"I shouldn't wonder if it was a case of necessity, mamma," he said musingly. "If I know one thing better than another it is that I would want to go in training for a spell before crossing that woman. I know when I was before the mast with her—"
Pearl Higgins burst into tears promptly. "I think you might spare me an account of that," she sobbed. "I'm sure I don't want to hear about your goings-on with anyone so ignorant as Hat Tyler. Yes, she is; she's ignorant, and comes of ignorant people. What does she amount to, I'd like to know? There's nothing to her at all. And now," she blazed forth in fierier tones, "you're half in sympathy with the woman this blessed minute! I suppose you think just because you rescued her from a watery grave you're in duty bound to side in with her and take her part against your own wife. I don't know how it is, but everything seems to fall out in that woman's favor."
"Well, ain't it so!" said Elmer, not as a question but as if the full force of the proposition had just struck him. "Now you mention it, I don't know that I ever knew Hat Tyler to come off second best in a transaction. I was talking to a party only the other day, and he said the same thing himself. He says, 'Hat's a smart woman, Elmer.'"