LITMIR.BIZ

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some of 'em say you've lost all the money you had put by. An awful sight of money, they say. Sears, tell me it isn't true—please."

      He regarded her in silence for a moment. Then he shook his head.

      "Part of it isn't true, Sarah," he answered, with a slight smile. "I haven't lost a big lot of money."

      "Oh, I'm so glad. Now I can tell 'em a few things, I guess."

      "I wouldn't tell 'em too much, because the other part is true. I have lost about all I had put by."

      "Oh, Sears!"

      "Um—hm. And served me right, of course. You can't make a silk ear out of a sow's purse, as old Cap'n Sam Doane used to love to say. You can't, no matter how good a purse—or—ear—it is. I was a pretty good sea cap'n if I do say it, but that wasn't any reason why I should have figured I was a good enough business man to back as slippery an eel as Jim Carpenter in the ship chandlery game ashore."

      "But—you——" Mrs. Macomber hesitated to utter the disgraceful word, "you didn't fail up, did you, Sears?" she faltered. "You know that's what they say you did."

      "Well, they say wrong. Carpenter failed, I didn't. I paid dollar for dollar. That's why I've got next to no dollars now."

      "But you—you've got some, Sears. You must have," hopefully, "because you've been paying me board. So you must have some left."

      The triumph in her face was pathetic. He hated to disturb her faith.

      "Yes," he said dryly, "I have some left. Maybe seven hundred dollars or some such matter. If I had my legs left it would be enough, or more than enough. I wouldn't ask odds of anybody if I was the way I was before that train went off the track. I'd lost every shot I had in the locker, but I'm not very old yet—some years to leeward of forty—there was more money to be had where that came from and I meant to have it. And then—well, then this happened to me."

      "I know. And to think that you was comin' down here on purpose to see me when it did happen. Seems almost as if I was to blame, somehow."

      "Nonsense! Nobody was to blame but the engineer that wrecked the train and the three hundred pound woman that fell on my legs. And the engineer was killed, poor fellow, and the woman was—well, she carried her own punishment with her, I guess likely. Anyhow, I should call it a punishment if I had to carry it. There, there, Sarah! Let's talk about somethin' else. You do your dishes and, long as you won't let me help you, I'll hop-and-go-fetch-it out to that settee in the front yard and look at the scenery. Just think! I've been in Bayport almost four months and haven't been as far as that gate yet—except when they lugged me in past it, of course. And I don't recall much about that."

      "I guess not, you poor boy. And I saw them bringin' you in, all stretched out, with your eyes shut, and as white as—— Oh, my soul and body! I don't want to think about it, let alone talk about it."

      "Neither do I, Sarah, so we won't. Do you realize how little I know of what's been goin' on in Bayport since I was here last? And do you realize how long it has been since I was here?"

      "Why, yes, I do, Sears. It's been almost six years; it will be just six on the tenth of next September."

      The speech was illuminating. He looked at her curiously.

      "You do keep account of my goin's and comin's, don't you, old girl?" he said. "Better than I do myself."

      "Oh, it means more to me than it does to you. You live such a busy life, Sears, all over the world, meetin' everybody in all kinds of places. For me, with nothin' to do but be stuck down here in Bayport—well, it's different with me—I have to remember. Rememberin' and lookin' ahead is about all I have to keep me interested."

      He was silent for a moment. Then he said: "It looks as if rememberin' was all I will be likely to have. Think of it, Sarah! Four months in Bayport and I haven't been to the post-office. That'll stand as a town record, I'll bet."

      "And—and you'll keep up your courage, Sears? You won't let yourself get blue and discouraged, for my sake if nobody else's?"

      He nodded. "I couldn't, Sarah," he said earnestly. "With you around I'd be ashamed to."

      She ran to help him down the step, but he waved her away, and, leaning upon the cane and clinging fast to the lattice with the other hand, he managed to make the descent safely. Once on the flat level of the walk he moved more rapidly and, so it seemed to his sister, more easily than he had since his accident. The forty odd feet of walk he navigated in fair time and came to anchor, as he would have expressed it, upon the battered old bench by the Macomber gate. The gate, like the picket fence, of which it was a part, needed paint and the bench needed slats in its back. Almost anything which Joel Macomber owned needed something and his wife and family needed most of all.

      An ancient cherry tree, its foliage now thickly spotted with green fruit, for the month was June, cast a shadow upon the occupant of the bench. At his feet grew a bed of daffodils and jonquils which Sarah Macomber had planted when she came, a hopeful bride, to that house. Each year they sprouted and bloomed and now, long after Sarah's hopes had ceased to sprout, they continued to flourish. Beside the cherry tree grew a lilac bush. Beyond the picket fence was the dusty sidewalk and beyond that the dustier, rutted road. And beyond the road and along it upon both sides were the houses and barns and the few shops of Bayport village, Bayport as it was, and as some of us remember it, in the early '70's.

      In some respects it was much like the Bayport of to-day. The houses themselves have changed but little. Then, as now, they were trim and white and green-shuttered. Then, as now, the roses climbed upon their lattices and the silver-leaf poplars and elms and mulberry trees waved above them. But the fences which enclosed their trim lawns and yards have disappeared, and the hitching posts and carriage blocks by their front gates have gone also. Gone, too, are the horses and buggies and carryalls which used to stand by these gates or within those barns. They are gone, just as the ruts and dust of the roads have vanished. When Mrs. Captain Hammond, of the lower road, used to call upon Mrs. Ryder at West Bayport, she was wont to be driven to her destination in the intensely respectable Hammond buggy drawn by the equally respectable Hammond horse and piloted by the even more respectable—not to say venerable—Hammond coachman, who was also gardener and "hired man." And they made the little journey in the very respectable time of thirty-five minutes. Now when Mrs. Captain Hammond's granddaughter, who winters in Boston but summers at the old home, wishes to go to West Bayport she skims over the hard, oiled macadam in her five thousand dollar runabout and she finishes the skimming in eight minutes or less.

      And although the dwellings along the Bayport roads are much as they were that morning when Captain Sears Kendrick sat upon the bench in the Macomber yard and gazed gloomily at the section of road which lay between the Macomber gate and the curve beyond the Orthodox meeting-house—although the houses were much the same in external appearance, those who occupy them at the present day are vastly different from those who owned and lived in them then. Here is the greatest change which time has brought to old Bayport. Now those houses—the majority of them—are open only in summer; then they were open all the year. They who come to them now regard them as playthings, good-time centers for twelve or fourteen weeks. Then they were the homes of men and women who were proud of them, loved them, meant to live in them—while on land—as long as life was theirs; to die in them if fortunate enough to be found by death while ashore; and at last to be buried near them, under the pines of the Bayport cemetery. Now these homes are used by business men or lawyers or doctors, whose real homes are in Boston, New York, Chicago, or other cities. Then practically every house was owned or occupied either by a sea captain, active or retired, or by a captain's widow or near relative.

      For example, as Captain Kendrick sat in his brother-in-law's yard on that June morning of that year in the early '70's, within his sight, that is within the half mile from curve to curve of the lower road, were no less than nine houses in which dwelt—or had dwelt—men who gained a living upon a vessel's quarter deck. Directly across the road was the large, cupola-crowned house of Captain Solomon Snow. Captain Sol was at present somewhere between Surinam and New York, bound home. His wife was

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