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.