Somebody was walking up the path before him; so he slackened his pace a little, having no wish to overtake him. As far as he could judge it was a boy of about twenty-one or so, very fair-haired, with broad shoulders and well-shaped hands hanging from sleeves a trifle too short. He carried a bag of tools and was whistling gaily some intricate tune of trills and runs as he walked along. As he turned to look out to sea, Billy saw that he had a pleasant face, cheerful, intelligent and rather sensitive. He stood for a minute, though without seeing Billy, then walked on again, swinging his bag and piping his music in the very best of spirits.
A bobolink was swinging on the branch of a bush that leaned over the wall. The gay black-and-white fellow was a new bird to Billy, so he stopped to look at it more closely. Certainly it was the bird that caught his attention not the unaccountable rustle that he heard immediately after, for that sound he might never have noticed save for the strange thing that followed.
For the rustle was repeated; then a hand rose over the wall, slipped across one of the big lichen-covered rocks and rapped upon it sharply with something metallic. The boy ahead of him stopped dead, hesitated a second, then turned slowly toward the sound. Billy could see now that there was a man there behind the wall, crouching among the bushes, some one rather small, narrow-shouldered and with stiff black hair. He seemed to be peering intently at the boy on the path but did not move or speak. The boy, also, said nothing but presently went upon his way again, swinging his bag and once more trying to whistle. But such a trembling, broken tune as came forth in place of the former cheerful music! The lad looked back once, but was gazing so eagerly at the wall that he did not notice Billy at all. He showed a face turned suddenly gray-white with terror, drawn, haggard and anxious. It was plainly visible that his knees shook under him as he tried to stride onward at his former gait, and that it was because of the trembling of his hands that his bag of tools dropped twice upon the grass.
What could have been in that man’s face that had alarmed him so? The boy looked like a vigorous, spirited sort of person, Billy thought, one that it might be nice to know and be friends with, not a coward. The mild interest that had brought him through the gate now gave place to extreme curiosity as he hurried up the path.
Around the curve of a low knoll Captain Saulsby’s house came into view. It was an oddly-shaped little dwelling, so surrounded with trees and bushes that there was not much to be seen of it except bits here and there: a peering chimney, patches of red-stained roof, a portion of gray wall and the front door painted a bright, cheerful blue. Sloping away to the rocky point lay Captain Saulsby’s garden, with its rows of vegetables and shrubs and flowers. Captain Saulsby himself was sitting in an armchair on the wide, stone doorstep, but alas he did not look in the least as Billy had expected.
He had pictured old sailors as being white-haired, but sturdy and upright, dressed in blue clothes and moving with a rolling walk or sitting to stare out to sea through a brass telescope. Captain Saulsby’s hair was not exactly white, it was indeed no particular color on earth; he wore shabby overalls a world too big even for his vast figure and he had carpet slippers instead of picturesque sea-boots. Yet the flavour of the sea somehow clung to him after all, brought out, perhaps, by the texture of his face which was red and weather-beaten with the skin wrinkled and thickened to the consistency of alligator leather, and by his huge rough hands that resembled nothing so much as the gnarled and stunted willow-trees at his gate.
Instead of grasping a telescope, he was holding a bright blue sock which he was mending as deftly as though well used to the task. The darning needle seemed lost between his big fingers, but it went in and out with great speed, pushed by a sailor’s palm instead of a thimble. That, Billy thought disappointedly, was the only really nautical thing about him.
“Good afternoon, Johann Happs,” the captain called cheerily as the first of his visitors came near. Then peering over his spectacles at Billy, he added, “Who is that behind you?” The boy whom he called Johann wheeled suddenly and turned upon Billy a look that he could never forget. Terror, desperation and defiance all were written on his unhappy face and in his startled eyes. When he saw, however, that it was not the black-haired man who had peered over the wall, but only a boy from the summer colony at the hotel, his evident bewilderment and relief might have been almost ridiculous had they not been pathetic. He laughed shakily and turned to the captain.
“I do not know who it is,” he said, “Perhaps someone to buy strawberries.”
“You’re Miss Mattie Pearson’s nephew, now I’ll be bound,” remarked the old man, surveying Billy carefully from head to foot as he came closer. “She told me all about you, where you had meant to go this summer and how you came here instead and maybe weren’t going to like us here on Appledore Island. Johann, look at that frown on his face; I don’t think he has sized us up very fair so far, do you? Well, he’ll learn, he’ll learn!”