turned his head, stared at me fishy-eyed, and got up off the box.

"What’s wrong?" I asked. "Is the world comin’ to an end?"

He put one hand to his head and waved the other up and down like a pump handle.

"Yes," he sings out, frantic like. "It is ended already. It is all over. I—I—"

And with that he jumps off the platform and goes staggerin’ up the road. I’d have follered him, but just then Jim Henry calls to me from inside the store and in a little while I’d forgot Beanblossom altogether. I thought of him once or twice durin’ the day, but ’twa’n’t till about shuttin’-up time that I thought enough to mention him to Jacobs. Then he mentioned him fust.

"Whew!" says he, settin’ down for the fust time in two hours. "Whew! I’m tired. This has been the best day this concern has had since I took hold of it, and I’ve worked like a perpetual motion machine. We’ll need another boy pretty soon, Skipper. Pullet’s no good as a salesman. By the way, where _is_ Pullet? I ain’t seen him since noon."

Neither had I, now that I come to think of it.

"I wonder if the poor critter’s sick," I says. Then I started to tell how queer he’d acted out on the platform. I’d just begun when Amos Hallett’s boy come into the store with a note."It’s for you, Cap’n Zeb," he says, all out of breath. "I meant to give it to you afore, but I just this minute remembered it. Mr. Beanblossom, he give it to me at the depot when he took the up train."

"Took the up train?" says I. "Who did? Not Pul—Mr. Beanblossom?"

"Yes," says the boy. "He’s gone to Boston, leastways the depot-master said he bought a ticket for there. Why? Didn’t you know it? He—"

I was too astonished to speak at all, but Jim Henry was cool as usual.

"Yes, yes, son," he says. "It’s all right. You trot right along home afore you catch cold in your freckles." Then, after the youngster’d gone, he turns to me quick. "Open it, Skipper," he orders. "Somethin’s happened. Open it."

I opened the envelope. Inside was a sheet of foolscap covered from top to bottom with mighty shaky handwritin’. I read it out loud.

"_Captain Zebulon Snow_,

"_Dear Sir_:

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