"I don't like to refuse you," protested the night-watchman, "but two of my horses are lame, and one is plumb used up carrying summer folks. I'm dreadful short. I haven't a team to my name I could put on the road to Gloucester. It's—why, to Squam it's seventeen miles—thirty-four the round trip. It would cost you—"
"I'll pay!" cried the lame man; "I'll pay. I ain't beggin'."
"I'm sorry I haven't got a horse," apologized the watchman. "It would cost you ten dollars if I had. But I hain't."
"Ten dollars?" The traveller echoed the words stupidly.
"I'm sorry; fact, I am," urged the watchman. "Won't you set 'n' rest a spell?"
But the visitor had vanished from the office.
Twenty minutes after, the door-bell of a home in the old residence portion of the town rang violently and pealed through the sleeping house.
It was a comfortable, not a new-fashioned, house, sometimes leased to summer citizens, and modernized in a measure for their convenience; one of the few of its kind within reach of the station, and by no means near.
When the master of the family had turned on all the burglar electricity and could get the screen up, he put his head out of the window, and so perceived on his door-step a huddled figure with a white, uplifted face.
A shaking voice came up: