“Captain Saulsby,” said Billy gravely, “I do believe you care a lot for those flowers of yours. You are always saying you don’t, but I think I won’t believe you again. I can see by the very way you look at them that you love them.”
“No, can you?” exclaimed the old sailor in genuine surprise. “Why—why—maybe I do now, I never thought of it.” He looked about the garden as though suddenly seeing it in a new light. “I hated the whole place bitterly enough when I first knew I must stop here all the rest of my life, and my only wish was that the time might not be long. But I’ve worked and tended and watched over it for five years and—well, you are right. I have learned to love it and never knew. That’s a queer thing, now, isn’t it?”
“How glad you must be that it wasn’t sold,” Billy went on, “that all that trouble and worry is over for good.”
“I’m not so sure of its being for good,” the old captain returned reflectively; “the fellow got clear away, and as long as he’s still free to make trouble, there will be mischief brewing. And there’s plenty more like him where he came from, too. No, there is still danger for Appledore Island, I am sure of that.”
“Do you think that German clock-maker could have helped him to get away?” Billy asked. “I have wondered a good deal if they didn’t have something to do with each other.” “There’s Germans and Germans,” the old man answered. “I put a lot of faith in Johann Happs, but the trouble of it is you can’t always tell. I think a time is coming, though, coming pretty soon, when things will show plainly which kind of German is which. But I may be wrong.”
Their talk was interrupted here by a visitor, not a summer tourist this time, but a person of a very different kind. It was Harvey Jarreth, fresh and smiling and sure of himself again, in spite of his unpleasant experience with the naval authorities and his weekend visit to Appledore’s jail. There had been no evidence to bring against him as to his transactions with the prosperous stranger, so that he had been set free after giving many promises that he would be more careful in future. His reputation for shrewdness had suffered greatly for a little time; but as the weeks passed and people began to forget the disturbance that they had never quite understood, Harvey Jarreth began to come into his own again.
He was jauntily dressed as ever today, in the light grey clothes that made his sandy complexion still sandier, and that by their extreme of fashion showed just how many years they lagged behind the present mode. His straw hat was a little frayed and battered at the edges, but he wore it at just such a cheerful angle as when Billy had first seen him.
“Well, Captain,” he began genially, “that was a queer business about that city friend of mine, wasn’t it? And the joke of it is that it looks just now as though you had been right about him. That’s pretty funny. Ha, ha!”
“It will go right on being just as big a joke,” returned the Captain sourly. “You had better go home and practice laughing at it until you can manage something better than that cackling you’re doing now. It takes a lot of learning for a man to know how to laugh at himself.”
Jarreth’s thin face flushed and he shifted his feet uneasily.