lessly against the wharf-rail. Raising his eyes from the ground, he beheld the one man of all the villagers who had remained unmoved, unsoftened by the spectacle. With his red cap shoved back upon his shining black hair the insolent stranger stood looking on with folded arms. Gregory noticed that Mascola had not even taken the trouble to remove the cigarette which hung damply from his lips.
For an instant the two men looked deep into each other's eyes. Then the procession passed on.
CHAPTER III
TANGLED THREADS
The death of his father hurled Kenneth Gregory into a new world—a world of unfamiliar faces, of strange standards of value, of vastly different problems—the world of business.
Kenneth Gregory had taken this world as he found it. There had been no time to moralize upon the situation into which the spinning of the wheel had plunged him. There was work to do.
Securing his discharge from the army he had turned to the task of settling up his father's estate. The fact that he was the sole heir and legal executor simplified matters. But there were complications. These he had unraveled with the aid of Farnsworth, the attorney for the estate. Then he had come to Legonia and found plenty to do.
Blair, the former manager of the Legonia Fish Cannery, had suffered an attack of pneumonia and was ill at a neighboring sanitarium. From him he could therefore learn nothing. The books of the company told him but little more. Now he was going over the private papers in his father's office.