Perhaps this was because she was unlike most other girls, and women too,
in that she had a sense of humour, got from having mixed with choice
spirits who visited her father and carried out at Angel Point a kind of
freemasonry, which had few rites and many charges and countercharges.
She had that almost impossible gift in a woman--the power of telling a
tale whimsically. It was said that once, when Orvay Lafarge, a new
Inspector of Customs, came to spy out the land, she kept him so amused
by her quaint wit, that he sat in the doorway gossiping with her, while
Tarboe and two others unloaded and safely hid away a cargo of liquors
from the Ninety-Nine. And one of the men, as cheerful as Joan herself,
undertook to carry a little keg of brandy into the house, under the very
nose of the young inspector, who had sought to mark his appointment by
the detection and arrest of Tarboe single-handed. He had never met
Tarboe or Tarboe's daughter when he made his boast. If his superiors had
known that Loco Bissonnette, Tarboe's jovial lieutenant, had carried the
keg of brandy into the house in a water-pail, not fifteen feet from where
Lafarge sat with Joan, they might have asked for his resignation. True,
the thing was cleverly done, for Bissonnette made the water spill quite
naturally against his leg, and when he turned to Joan and said in a
crusty way that he didn't care if he spilled all the water in the pail,
he looked so like an unwilling water-carrier that Joan for one little
moment did not guess.
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