"Perhaps I can help you; my eyes are good."
He went back a step or two, bending down and scrutinizing the brown earth. Orrick, presently announcing that the coin might have rolled, made a slow way across the road on his knees, patting the ground with his hand as he moved. Near the edge of it, half in the woods, lay a thick piece of split firewood, long as a man's arm and stouter. The knotted old fingers stealthily closed on it.
"It could n't have rolled far on this soft road," said Varney presently.
"Just where do you think you dropped it?"
Sam Orrick rose behind his stooping figure with upraised club, a blaze of triumph in his sodden old eyes.
"There!" he cried with a senseless laugh. "It's there, Stanhope!"
The club fell with a thud; and Varney, meeting it as he straightened up, toppled over like a log, face downward.
Old Orrick stared down at the prostrate figure, and presently touched it with his tattered foot. It did not stir. His fierce joy died. He looked about him apprehensively, and his eye fell at once upon a dim-lit cottage off the road just back of him. His cottage—how had he forgotten that? Was that dark thing—a man—standing there at the gate? Suddenly a great terror seized the old man. He threw his stick into the woods and slunk away, toward the town. A loud yell from behind brought his heart to his throat, and he broke into a wild, lumbering run.
CHAPTER XXI
MR. FERRIS STANHOPE MEETS HIS DOUBLE; AND LETS THE DOUBLE MEET EVERYTHING ELSE
In the new-made study of his Remsen road cottage, Ferris Stanhope, Hunston's returned celebrity, sat under a green-shaded lamp and frowned down at a sheaf of his own neat manuscript. Behind him, in a corner, books and various knick-knacks lay spilled over the floor around an open trunk. The room was, in fact, in the litter incident to getting to rights. But this did not act as a stay on the great man's habit of industry, which happened to be of the most persistent variety.