"Rubbish!" I sung out. "Dark horse be hanged! Shelton’s square as a brick. Nobody can bribe him."

"It ain’t a question of bribin’," he says. "If it was, you could bribe, too. Shelton is square, and that’s why he’d welcome a compromise candidate. But if it comes to a fight between Mary Blaisdell and Abubus Payne, Abubus’ll win because he’s the Major’s pet. Shelton knows the Major better than he knows you. Take my advice now and look out for the dark horse."

But I wouldn’t listen. All the next hour I was ugly as a bear with a sore head and long afore dinner time I told Jacobs I was goin’ for a sail in the _Glide_. "Goin’ somewheres on salt water where the air’s clean and not p’isoned by politics and automobiles and congressmen and Paynes," I told him.

I headed out of the harbor and then run, afore a wind that was fair but gettin’ lighter all the time, up the bay. I sailed and sailed until some of my bad temper wore off and my appetite begun to come back. All the time I was settin’ at the tiller I was thinkin’ over the post-office situation and, try as hard as I could to see the bright side for Mary Blaisdell, it looked pretty dark. The Major would give that Shelton man the time of his life and he’d talk Abubus to him to beat the cars. I couldn’t get at the Congressman to put in an oar for Mary and—well, I’d have discounted my five-dollar bet for about seventy-five cents, at that time.

I thought and thought and sailed and sailed. When I came to myself and realized I was hungry the _Glide_ was miles away from Ostable. I came about and started to beat back; then I saw I was in for a long job. Let alone that the wind was ahead, ’twas dyin’ fast, and if I knew the signs of a flat calm, there was one due in half an hour. I took as long tacks as I could, but I made mighty little progress.

On the second tack inshore I came up abreast of Jonathan Crowell’s house at Heron P’int. Jonathan’s just a no-account longshoreman or he wouldn’t live in that place, which is the fag-end of creation. There’s a twenty-mile stretch of beach and pines and such close to the shore there, with a road along it. The first eight mile of that road is pretty good macadam and hard dirt. A land company tried to develop that section of beach once and they put in the road; but the land didn’t sell and the company busted and after that eight mile the road is just beach sand, soft and coarse. The strip of solid ground, with its pines and scrub-oaks, is, as I said afore, twenty mile long, but it’s only a half mile or so wide. Between it and the main cape is 

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