Old. He was a young man, almost boyish-looking. He had on a pair of fine
tan shoes, brown overalls, a new gray mackinaw coat buttoned to his
chin. He was bareheaded. Also he wore a patch of pink celluloid over his
right eye.

When he turned into the small half-moon bight, he let up on his oars and
drifted, staring with a touch of surprise at a white cottage-roofed
house with wide porches sitting amid an acre square of bright green lawn
on a gentle slope that ran up from a narrow beach backed by a low
sea-wall of stone where the gravel ended and the earth began.

"Hm-m-m," he muttered. "It wasn't built yesterday, either. Funny he
never mentioned _that_."

He pushed on the oars and the boat slid nearer shore, the man's eyes
still steadfast on the house. It stood out bold against the grass and
the deeper green of the forest behind. Back of it opened a hillside
brown with dead ferns, dotted with great solitary firs and gnarly
branched arbutus.

No life appeared there. The chimneys were dead. Two moorings bobbed in
the bay, but there was no craft save a white rowboat hauled high above
tidewater and canted on its side.

"I wonder, now." He spoke again.

While he wondered and pushed his boat slowly in on the gravel, a low
_pr-r-r_ and a sibilant ripple of water caused him to look behind. A
high-bowed, shining mahogany cruiser, seventy feet or more over all,
rounded the point and headed into the bay. The smooth sea parted with a