There were blue flannel shirts dangling on wooden hangers to show all their breadth of shoulder and the array of smoked-pearl buttons. Brown and blue dungaree overalls were likewise displayed--grimly, like men hanging in chains. At the end of one row of these quite ordinary habiliments was one dress shirt with pleated bosom and cuffs as stiff as a board. Lawford Tapp sometimes speculated on that shirt--how it chanced to be in Cap'n Abe's stock and why it had hung there until the flies had taken title to it! Centrally located was the stove, its four heavily rusted legs set in a shallow box which was sometimes filled with fresh sawdust. The stovepipe, guyed by wires to the ceiling, ran back to the chimney behind Cap'n Abe. He stood at the one space that was kept cleared on his counter, hairy fists on the brown, hacked plank--the notches of the yard-stick and fathom-stick cut with a jackknife on its edge--his pale eyes sparkling as he talked. "There she wallered," went on the narrator of maritime disaster, "her cargo held together by rotting sheathing and straining ribs. She was wrung by the seas like a dishrag in a woman's hands. She no longer mounted the waves; she bored through 'em. 'Twas a serious time--to hear Cap'n Am'zon tell it." "I guess it must ha' been, Abe," Milt Baker put in hastily. "Gimme a piece o' that Brown Mule chewin' tobacker." "I'll _sell_ it to ye, Milt," the storekeeper said gently, with his hand on the slide of the cigar and tobacco showcase. "That's what I mean," rejoined Milt boldly, fishing in his pocket for the required nickel. "For fourteen days while the _Posy Lass_ was drivin' off shore before an easterly gale, Cap'n Am'zon an' two others, lashed to the stump o' the fo'mast, _ex_-isted in a smother of foam an' spume, with the waves picklin' 'em ev'ry few minutes. And five raw potaters was all they had to eat in all that endurin' time!" "Five potatoes?" Lawford Tapp cried. "For three men? And for fourteen days? Good-_night_!" Cap'n Abe stared at him for a moment, his eyes holding sparks of indignation. "Young man," he said tartly, "you should hear Cap'n Am'zon himself tell it. You wouldn't cast no doubts upon his statement." Cap'n Joab snorted and turned his back again. Young Tapp felt somewhat abashed. "Yes, sir!" proceeded Cap'n Abe who seldom lost the thread of one of his stories, "they was lashed to that stump of a mast and they lived on them potaters--scraping 'em fine with their sheath-knives, and husbandin' 'em like they was jewels. One of 'em went mad." "One o' the potaters?" gasped Amiel Perdue. "_Who_ went crazy--your brother, Cap'n Abe?" Milt asked cheerfully. He had squandered a nickel in trying to head off the flow of the storekeeper's story, and felt that he was entitled to something besides the Brown Mule.