“Figger-Four” was holding Uncle Wharff at the big door almost by main force, and the old man, in spite of his fright, was trying his best to play. But his goggling eyes were too busy with the distracted Imogene, who was now occupied with her last leg-chain, which was attached to an upright beam supporting an end of the scaffold. Amidst her hollow roarings the feeble tones of the flute wailed like a cricket’s chirpings in a tornado. If anything were needed to add to the exasperation of the desolated Imogene it was this mocking presence in the barn-door. With a last plunge she pulled the beam from under the scaffold and made for the door, sweeping her trunk at the men in her path. But the dragging log impeded her for a moment until she shook it out of the bight of chain. Avery and Uncle Wharff rolled over the driveway and crawled under the barn, and Imogene strode down across the field pursuing the horses. “Perhaps I didn’t play the right tune,” the Squire heard “Hard-Times” gasp under the bam in reply to an angry growl from Avery. But he didn’t wait to interrogate them. That elephant was abroad, evidently with mind determined on mischief, and he felt that his first duty was to secure a band of elephant hunters in the village and start them on the trail. When he turned into the street from the yard the parrot vigorously snapped a bar of his cage and yelled after him, “Hey, Rube!” This final and unconscious touch of satire was too much for Squire Phin’s sense of the ludicrous. He turned in his tracks and surveyed the old homestead behind the poplars. “Headquarters of the Look Brothers’ Grand Consolidated Circus and Menagerie,” he muttered, a smile creasing his cheeks even while he frowned. “I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or swear damnation!” Then he hurried on to round up his elephant posse. CHAPTER XIII--THE “COME-UPPANCE” OF CAPTAIN NYMPHUS BODFISH OF THE PACKET “EFFORT” “I’m a serious-minded man, I have sailed from old Cape Ann For fifty years, and I’ve braved as much as ary a mortal can. I ain’ afraid of the stormy sea, Nor critters that swim it, whatever they be, But a witch of a woman is what floors me.” --Sea-song of the “Baches of Bucksport.” The Palermo packet, “Effort,” rocked slowly on the refuse-strewn ooze in her berth at Merrithew’s wharf, Square Harbour, her gray, weather-streaked sides rubbing at the barnacles on the piles. On the upper step of her cuddy companionway sat her skipper, Captain Nymphus Bodfish, rubbing his raspy palm over his bristly gray beard, the little curls of which were much like barnacles, too. “I tell ye, set quiet,” he growled down the companionway. “I ain’t run packet here for ten years not to know when trains leave or not to know how to telefoam for a hack when I want one. That hack will be here ha’f-past twelve and it will get you to the deppo plenty in time.”