"Oh, land sakes!" wailed Nancy. "I've been in here fifteen minutes and I haven't sold a stick. We should have charged admission." Isabel looked on rather importantly. Evidently she knew or thought she knew how to handle a crowd of boys. "You've got to get in line!" she announced. A laugh, a whole series of laughs was her answer. "Do you hear me?" she insisted, raising her voice to suit the occasion. "Sure, we hear you. Want us to clap?" answered impudent Sammy Larkins. "Now see here," Ruth attempted to order. "If you boys really want to buy anything you have got to stand back and take turns--" No sooner had that order been given than everybody made a dash for the first place in line, and the tumult that followed all but drove Nancy under the counter. "Say, look here! Want us to put you all out?" demanded Ted, in unassumed indignation. "Try it!" tempted Buster, pretending to roll up sleeves he didn't have. "But don't you want to see the things?" cried out Ruth in desperation, for those boys were tumbling around the floor and actually fighting, at least they made that kind of noise, it seemed to the girls. "Su-ure!" came a chorus. Then Nancy had an inspiration. She got up on the high stool that stood by what used to be Miss Townsend's desk and she immediately commanded attention. "I'll tell you," she began, "if you all sit down on the floor just where you are, the window sills or any place, I'll tell you about some of the most interesting things we've got here. They are not for sale, but they belonged to a sea captain--" The magic word had the desired effect. At the word "sea captain" that crowd of boys, dropped "in their traces," and it was then Nancy's duty to unfold to them some wondrous tale. For boys like a story--when it's about a sea captain even if they are out to buy bargain fishing tackle. CHAPTER IX THE BIG DAY As Ted said afterwards: "It was some story!" Nancy stood there on the stool, dangling an old rusty knife which she had just spied among the box of unclassified articles, and she told those boys a yarn, a regular old salt-yarn, which she frankly admitted was pure fiction. But how they listened! As Ruth expressed it: "How _hard_ they listened!" No more jostling, nor pushing nor underhand squabbling. Every boy among them wanted to hear all that story, and consequently he was taking no chances on missing any of it. "And when the old sea captain looked into the poor half-frozen face of that baby he had picked up, lashed to an icy--an icy plank," Nancy trilled, becoming so interested in her subject she almost forgot the make up of it, "then he remembered," she went on, "the big Newfoundland dog, Jack, who had fallen back into the sea exhausted from his long swim." She stopped. The boys said "Gosh," and "Gee Whiz." Buster said "Jingo!" and there were probably many other subdued and impulsive exclamations of the crisp boyish variety.