Capn Abe, Storekeeper | Page 5

neither an assumption of familiarity nor any bucolic embarrassment. "I am bound that way myself."
"Thank you!" she said with just enough dignity to warn him to keep his distance if he chanced to be contemplating anything familiar. "But I shall dine at the hotel first."
A brighter color flooded into his cheeks and Louise felt that she might have been too sharp with him. She mended this by adding:
"You may tell me how to get to the Shell Road and Mr. Silt's, if you will be so kind."
He smiled at that. Really, he was an awfully nice-looking youth! She had no idea that these longshore fishermen would be so gentlemanly and so good looking.
"Oh, you can't miss it. Take the first left-hand street, and keep on it. Cap'n Abe's store is the only one beyond the Mariner's Chapel."
"Thank you," she said again and mounted the broad steps of the Inn. The young fellow hesitated as though he were inclined to enter too. But when Louise reached the piazza and glanced quickly down at him, he was moving on.
The cool interior of a broad hall with a stairway mounting out of it and a screened dining-room at one side, welcomed the girl. A bustling young woman in checked gingham, which fitted her as though it were a mold for her rather plump figure, met the visitor.
"How-do!" she said briskly. "Goin' to stop?"
"Only for dinner," Louise said, smiling--and when she smiled her gray eyes made friends.
"Almost over. But I'll run an' tell the cook to dish you up something hot. Come right this way an' wash. I'll fix you a table where it's cool. This is 'bout the first hot day we've had."
She showed the visitor into the dressing-room and then bustled away. Later she hovered about the table where Louise ate, the other boarders having departed.
"My name's Gusty Durgin," she volunteered. "I reckon you're one o' them movin' picture actresses they say are goin' to work down to The Beaches this summer."
"What makes you think so?" asked Louise, somewhat amused.
"Why--you kinder look it. I should say you had 'screen charm.' Oh! I been readin' up about you folks for a long time back. I subscribed to The Fillum Universe that tells all about you. I'd like to try actin' before the cam'ra myself. But I cal'late I ain't got much 'screen charm,'" the waitress added seriously. "I'm too fat. And I wouldn't do none of them comedy pictures where the fat woman always gets the worst of it. But you must take lovely photographs."
"I'm not sure that I do," laughed Louise.
"Land sakes! Course you do. Them big eyes o' yourn must just look fetchin' in a picture. I don't believe I've ever seen you in a movie, have I, Miss------?"
"Grayling."
"'Grayling'! Ain't that pretty?" Gusty Durgin gave an envious sigh. "Is it your honest to goodness, or just your fillum name?"
"My 'honest to goodness,'" the visitor confessed, bubbling with laughter.
"Land sakes! I should have to change mine all right. The kids at school useter call me 'Dusty Gudgeon.' Course, my right name's Augusta; but nobody ever remembers down here on the Cape to call anybody by such a long name. Useter be a boy in our school who was named 'Christopher Columbus George Washington Marquis de Lafayette Gallup.' His mother named him that. But everybody called him 'Lafe'--after Lafayette, ye see.
"Land sakes! I should just have to change my name if I acted in the pictures. Your complexion's real, too, ain't it?" pursued this waitress with histrionic ambitions. "Real pretty, too, if 'tis high colored. I expect you have to make up for the pictures, just the same."
"I suppose I should. I believe it is always necessary to accentuate the lights and shadows for the camera."
"'Accentuate'--yep. That's a good word. I'll remember that," said Gusty. "You goin' to stay down to The Beaches long---and will you like it?"
"The Beaches?"
"That's where you'll work. At the Bozewell house. Swell bungalow. All the big bugs live along The Beaches."
"I am not sure just how long I shall stay," confessed Louise Grayling; "but I know I am going to like it."
CHAPTER II
CAP'N ABE
"I see by the Globe paper," Cap'n Abe observed, pushing up from his bewhiskered visage the silver-bowed spectacles he really did not need, "that them fellers saved from the wreck of the Gilbert Gaunt cal'late they went through something of an adventure."
"And they did," rejoined Cap'n Joab Beecher, "if they seen ha'f what they tell about."
"I dunno," the storekeeper went on reflectively, staring at a huge fishfly booming against one of the dusty window panes. "I dunno. Cap'n Am'zon was tellin' me once't about what he and two others went through with after the Posy Lass, out o' Bangor, was smashed up in a big blow off Hat'ras. What them fellers in the Globe paper