"Oh! What is it?" cried the girl, springing to his side.
He pointed with shaking index finger to the bird within the cage.
"Dead!" he said brokenly, "Dead, Niece Louise! Poor old Jerry's
dead--and him and me shipmates for so many, many years."
"Oh!" screamed the girl, grasping his arm. "_You are Cap'n Abe_!"
CHAPTER XXVII
SARGASSO
After all, when she considered it later, Louise wondered only that she
had not seen through the masquerade long before.
From the beginning--the very first night of her occupancy of the
pleasant chamber over the store on the Shell Road--she should have
understood the mystery that had had the whole neighborhood by the ears
during the summer.
She, more than anybody else, should have seen through Cap'n Abe's
masquerade. Louise had been in a position, she now realized, to have
appreciated the truth.
"You are Cap'n Abe," she told him, and he did not deny it. Sadly he
looked at the dead canary in the bottom of the cage, and wiped his eyes.
"Poor Jerry!" her uncle said, and in that single phrase all the outer
husk of the rough and ready seaman--the character he had assumed in
playing his part for so many weeks--sloughed away.
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