“We have something on hand, you know. Shall we let it go?” Paul whispered.
Worth nodded and the visible pleasure of the aged farmer as he climbed awkwardly up to a front seat could not but give his young friends pleasure also.
“You must have been up pretty early if you walked to town this morning,” observed Worth to the old gentleman at his side.
“Y-a-a-a-s,” Mr. Peek replied, drawing the word out to great length, as if he were really thinking of something else. And after a long pause he said, “Did I tell you t’other day about someone bein’ around my house in the night?”
Yes, he had told them, the boys answered, and he went on: “It has fretted me every day. An’ last evenin’ I got to feelin’ so down in the mouth and glum I just concluded I’d get some cartridges for my old rifle. It’d make me feel safer to know I had a loaded gun right handy. So I went to town first thing this mornin’. I might ’a’ drove, but my old horse is ’bout the same as I be,—almost ready to say good-bye.”
Mr. Peek was lost for a time in his own meditations. The Torpedo whirred along at an easy speed and he seemed to enjoy greatly the pleasant motion of the car and gentle sweep of the wind. “’Tain’t much like water power, is it?” he remarked, as if he had been contrasting in his mind the machinery and appliances of his young manhood with the automobiles and electric motors of the present day. “I suspect you boys never saw a water wheel,” he said musingly.
No, they had not, said Billy, and in answer to a question whether they would like to see one, both he and Paul were quite sure they would.
The car was rumbling along the lonely South Fork now. The old mill, the gray, old house of the miller, empty and cheerless, the pond and the icehouse were but a little way forward.
“If you’d like to stop at the mill, I’ll show you a water wheel,” said Mr. Peek. “And it’d have been runnin’ yet, but—” Not finishing this sentence, the possible conclusion of which the boys could easily guess, the old gentleman after a little hesitation continued: “I can’t get around like I used to and not as much as I ought to. I ain’t been in the mill for nigh onto two years.”
Billy halted the car before the weather-worn buildings. He glanced toward Paul as if he felt some misgiving in entering the ruins of the once busy place in company with the ruin of him whose wrecked hopes were responsible for all the gloom and decay in this otherwise charming valley.