Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

A CHOICE

"Of course, my dear, there is nobody but your Aunt Euphemia for you to go to!"

"Oh, daddy-professor! Nobody? Can we rake or scrape up no other relative on either side of the family who will take in poor little me for the summer? You will be home in the fall, of course."

"That is the supposition," Professor Grayling replied, his lips pursed reflectively. "No. Dear me! there seems nobody."

"But Aunt Euphemia!"

"I know, Lou, I know. She expects you, however. She writes——"

"Yes. She has it all planned," sighed Louise Grayling dejectedly.
"Every move at home or abroad Aunt Euphemia has mapped out for me. When
I am with her I am a mere automaton—only unlike a real marionette I can
feel when she pulls the strings!"

The professor shook his head. "There's—there's only your poor mother's half-brother down on the Cape."

"What half-brother?" demanded Louise with a quick smile that matched the professor's quizzical one.

"Why——Well, your mother, Lou, had an older half-brother, a Mr. Silt. He keeps a store at Cardhaven. You know, I met your mother down that way when I was hunting seaweed for the Smithsonian Institution. Your grandmother was a Bellows and her folks lived on the Cape, too. Her family has died out and your grandfather was dead before I married your mother. The half-brother, this Mr. Silt—Captain Abram Silt—is the only individual of that branch of the family left alive, I believe."

"Goodness!" gasped the girl. "What a family tree!"

Again the professor smiled whimsically. "Only a few of the branches.
But they all reach back to the first navigators of the world."

"The first navigators?"

"I do not mean to the Phoenicians," her father said. "I mean that the world never saw braver nor more worthy sailors than those who called the wind-swept hamlets of Cape Cod their home ports. The Silts were all master-mariners. This Captain Abe is a bachelor, I believe. You could not very well go there."

Louise sighed. "No; I couldn't go there—I suppose. I couldn't go there——" Her voice wandered off into silence. Then suddenly, almost explosively, it came back with the question: "Why couldn't I?"

"My dear Lou! What would your aunt say?" gasped the professor.

He was a tall, rather soldierly looking man—the result of military training in his youth—with a shock of perfectly white hair and a sweeping mustache that contrasted clearly with his pink, always cleanly shaven cheeks and chin. Without impressing the observer with his muscular power. Professor Grayling was a better man on a long hike and possessed more reserve strength than many more beefy athletes.

His daughter had inherited his springy carriage and even the clean pinkness of his complexion—always looking as though she were fresh from her shower. But there was nothing mannish about Lou Grayling—nothing at all, though she had other attributes of body and mind for which to thank her father.

They were the best of chums. No father and daughter could have trod the odd corners of the world these two had visited without becoming so closely attached to each other that their processes of thought, as well as their opinions in most matters, were almost in perfect harmony....