"Queer old fellow," mused Winn to himself two hours later, after he had parted from Jess, "but I doubt if he buys much of this quarry stock." It is likely that surmise would have been a positive certainty if Jess Hutton, with horse sense as hard as this granite ledge and wits as keen as the briars that grew on top of it, had known that the quarry he had sold for two thousand dollars and considered it well paid for, was the sole basis for a stock company capitalized at one million dollars. But he did not, and neither does many another blind fool who buys "gilt-edged" stock in gold mines, oil wells, and schemes of all sorts, know that his investment rests on as insecure and trifling a basis; for the world is full of sharpers who continually set traps for the unwary and always catch them, and, although their name is legion, their dupes are as the sands of the sea.
But of Winn Hardy, who had come to Rockhaven, as he honestly believed and felt, to carry out a legitimate business enterprise, it must not be thought that he for one moment understood the deep-laid schemes of J. Malcolm Weston, for he did not. While the ratio of value between the capitalization of the Rockhaven Granite Company and the original cost of the quarry seemed absurd, it did not follow but that Weston & Hill might not intend actually to put capital into it sufficient to warrant such an issue of stock. All of which would go to show that Winn Hardy had not as yet entirely escaped the trammels of his inherited honesty and bringing up, which insensibly led him to judge others by himself.
And that afternoon, having nothing to do, and curious to explore this rock-ribbed island that was like to be his home for some months, he started out on a tour of exploration. First he followed the seldom-used road that connects the two villages, up to Northaven, and looked that over. There was a little green in the centre where stood the small church, and grouped about, a dozen or two houses and two or three stores, while back of this, and below an arm of the harbor, it narrowed down to where the roadway crossed it. Beside this stood an old stone mill, or what was once the walls of one, for the roof was gone. He examined it carefully, peering into its ghostly interior and down to where the ebb tide had left its base walls bare. To this, and to the piles that had once held the tide gates, were clinging masses of black mussels, with here and there a pink starfish nestled among them. Then, following this arm of the sea until it ended, he crossed a half mile of billowing ledges of rock between which were grass-grown and bush-choked dingles, and came to the ocean. Then, following the coast line as well as possible, owing to the jutting cliffs, he reached a deep inlet with almost precipitous sides, and, turning inland, found its banks ended in a dense thicket of spruce.
Through this wound a well-defined path, shadowy beneath the canopy of evergreen boughs, and velvety with fallen needles. Following this a little way, he came to an opening view of the ocean once more. The day was wondrously fair, the blue water all about barely rippled by a gentle breeze, while here and there and far to seaward gleamed the white sails of coasters. Below him, where the rock-walled gorge broadened to meet the ocean, the undulating ground swells leisurely tossed the rockweed and brown kelpie upward, as they swept over the sloping rocks. For a few moments he stood spellbound by the silent and solemn grandeur of the limitless ocean view and the colossal pathway to the water's edge below him, and then suddenly there came to his ears the faint sound of a violin. Now low and soft, hardly above the rhythmic pulse of the sea, and again clear and distinct, it seemed to come up out of the rocks ahead, a strange, weird, ghostly harmony that, mingling with the whisper of the distant wave-wash, sounded exquisitely sweet.
Breathless with astonishment now, he crept forward slowly, step by step, until at the head of this deep chasm, and down beneath him, he heard the well-recognized strains of "Annie Laurie" played by invisible hands.
The sun was low in the west, the sea an unruffled mirror, the coast line a fretwork of foam fringe where the ground swells met it, and above its murmur, trilling and quivering in the still air, came that old, old strain:—
"And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I'd lay me doon and dee,"
repeated again and again, until Winn, enraptured, spellbound, moving not a finger but listening ever, heard it no more. Then presently, as watching and wondering still whence and from whose hand had come this almost uncanny music, he saw, deep down amid the tangle of rocks below him, a slight, girlish figure emerge, with a dark green bag clasped tenderly under one arm, and slowly pick her way up the sides of the defile and disappear toward the village.