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Updated: June 28, 2025
Cap'n Sproul recognized the speaker with an uncontrollable snort of disgust. It was Marengo Todd, most obnoxious of all that hateful crowd of the Cap'n's "wife's relations" the man who had misused the Cap'n's honeymoon guilelessness in order to borrow money and sell him spavined horses. Marengo surveyed them gloomily from under a driving-cap visor huge as a sugar-scoop.
He hesitated a long time, blinking hard as each shovelful of dirt sprayed against the breeze. Then he grasped an opportunity when he could talk with Cap'n Sproul apart, and said, huskily: "It's still all guesswork and uncertain, and you stand to lose a lot of expense. I know I promised not to talk business with you, but couldn't you consider a proposition to stand in even?"
Cap'n Sproul, feeling safer on his own legs than in Hiram's team, pounded away down the road with the speed of a frantic Percheron. And in all this panic T. Taylor, only dimly realizing that there was something in his stove that was going to cause serious trouble, obeyed the exhortations screamed at him, cut away his horse, straddled the beast's back and fled with the rest.
"I thought that prob'ly you knew some stylish and reliable gold-bricker havin' met same when you was travellin' round in the show business." Replying to Mr. Look's indignant snort Cap'n Sproul hastened to say: "Oh, I don't mean that you had any gold-bricker friends, but that you knew one I could hire. Probably, though, you don't know of any. Most like you don't.
But the cracking report of the bursting sail, and now the dreadful clamor of the imprisoned Cap'n Sproul, stirred her fears. She raised her trunk and trumpeted with bellowings that shamed the blast. "Let him up now, 'Delphus!" shouted Hiram, after twirling the wheel vainly and finding that the Dobson heeded it not. "If there ain't no sails up he can't take us out to sea.
Missiles that screamed overhead signalized to the scattered fugitives the utter disintegration of T. Taylor's stove. The hearth mowed off a crumbly chimney on the Luce house, and flying fragments crushed out sash in the windows of the abandoned main part. Cap'n Sproul was the first one to reappear, coming from behind a distant tree. There was a hole in the ground where T. Taylor's wagon had stood.
"Wasn't it the wind snatched it away?" asked Jack Darrow, before the professor was ready to answer. "Don't seem to be no wind blowing just at present," said Captain Sproul. "Wait!" commanded the professor. "Order every companionway and hatch closed. Do not allow a man to go on deck, nor to open a deadlight. We must exist upon the air that remains in the vessel for the present."
Cap'n Sproul busied himself with a little pile of smudgy account-books, each representing a road district of the town. He was adding "snow-bills." Mr. Tate gazed forlornly on the fiercely puckered brow and "plipping" lips, and heard the low growl of profanity as the Cap'n missed count on a column and had to start over again. Then Mr. Tate sighed and opened his portfolio.
After his first batch of letters had brought those returns from the regretful great he had been recklessly scattering invitations from the Atlantic to the Pacific appealing invitations done in his best style, and sanctioned by the aegis of a committee headed by "Captain Sproul, Chairman."
And, as it was near dinner-time, Cap'n Sproul trudged into his own house, his mien thoughtful and his air subdued. On his next visit to Hiram, the Cap'n didn't know which was the most preoccupied the showman sitting in the barn door at Imogene's feet, or the battered P.T. propped disconsolately on one leg.
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