in the middle thirties a great cry went up on Boughton Island. Little Martha King was missing. There was concern that the little girl was alone and soared in the woods. The truth was that she was alone but she wasn’t scared. Martha was sleeping.

She loved to visit at Uncle Nathan Allen’s house. Nathan was a bachelor. He had intended to be married. Olive Hansen was her name and she lived across the Bay in Burnt Point. Nobody knows why it didn’t pan out but it didn’t. Nathan stayed on Boughton Island and didn’t try to find another girl to share his home. He kept his house in nice condition. Hand-hooked mats brightened the floors and Martha often went to visit Uncle Nathan.

This was the reason she was on the missing list for a long day and evening. She went to visit Uncle Nathan and he wasn’t home. She checked his bedroom to see if he was there and tried out the feather mattress on Uncle Nathan’s bed. She fell asleep. When she didn’t get home at supper time, the search began. Every able-bodied person on the Island joined in the search. Darkness came on and the situation became desperate. The theories about her disappearance became more and more imaginative. Pigs were in a pen that was accessible. Was it possible that the pigs could have attacked her and, horror of horrors, eaten her?

The end came late that night but quickly. Nathan ran out of tobacco and made a quick visit back home to get some more. As it happened, his stock of tobacco was in his bedroom. That was how Martha was found.

Was father was engaged in a twice-weekly delivery of mail from Yostons in Launching to the Boughton

Island post office. Included in the mail was a telegram addressed to him. It was wartime and it was well known that this was the way families found out about the deaths or injuries of servicemen. Regular letters had been coming from Lloyd and John. They were in the thick of the fighting in Holland. For Dan King, the telegram was not his to open until it went through the Boughton Island post office. The journey he took that day involved walking the mile from Yostons to the shore at the bay, then the trip by dory for the mile-long passage to Boughton Island. Then by foot again to the post office in the MacCormack’s home where Annie MacCormack was now post-mistress. By then he was entitled

to open his telegram. But by then, after suffering the agony of the 3D