"Cap'n Sears, answer me right straight out. Have those dummed everlastin' Fair Harbor hens been in my garden again?" "Yes, Judah." "Have they--have they?----" Words failed him. He strode up the path to the garden. Then, after a moment's comprehensive gaze upon the scene of ruin, the words returned. CHAPTER IV Sears Kendrick's prophecy that Bayport would, within the next day or two, talk about him even more than it had before was a true one. As soon as it became known that he had left the Macomber home and was boarding and lodging with Judah Cahoon in the rear portion of the General Minot house every tongue in the village--tongues of animals and small children excepted--wagged his name. At the sewing-circle, at the Shakespeare Reading Society--convening that week at Mrs. Tabitha Crosby's--after Friday night prayer-meeting at the Orthodox meeting-house, in Eliphalet Bassett's store at mail times, in the sitting-rooms and kitchens and around breakfast, dinner and supper tables from West Bayport to East Bayport Neck and from Poverty Lane to Woodchuck's Misery--the principal topic was Captain Kendrick's surprising move. "Why?" that was the question. Various answers were offered, many reasons suggested, but none satisfied everybody. At the Shakespeare Society meeting, just before the reading aloud of "Cymbeline" began--"Cymbeline" carefully edited, censored and kalsomined by the selective committee, Mrs. Reverend David Dishup and Miss Tryphosa Taylor--the feelings of the genteel section of the community were expressed by no less a personage than Mrs. Captain Elkanah Wingate. Mrs. Wingate, speaking from the Mount Sinai of Bayport's aristocracy, made proclamation thus: "Why, if the man must leave his sister's and go somewhere else to live, _why_ in the world does he choose to go _there_? Aren't there good, respectable, genteel boarding-houses like--well, like yours, Naomi, for instance? _I_ should say so." Mrs. Naomi Newcomb, whose home sheltered a few "paying guests," smiled and shook her head. The shake indicated not a doubt of Mrs. Wingate's judgment, but complete loss as to Sears Kendrick's reasons for behaving as he had. Other members shook their heads also. Mary-Pashy Foster, who had spent a winter in France when her husband was ill with the small-pox at Havre, shrugged her shoulders. "And," continued Mrs. Captain Wingate, "when you consider the place he has gone to and the person he has gone with! Good heavens, _I_ say! Good heavens!" More words and exclamations of approval. Several others declared that they said so, too. "Gone to live," went on Mrs. Wingate, "not in the General Minot house proper--there might be some explanation for _that_, perhaps--but they tell me that this Judah Cahoon only uses the back part of the house and that Cap'n Kendrick has got a room just off the kitchen or thereabouts."