“If it’s the Codfish—” Vi was saying desperately, when the little door opened and she clapped her hand to her mouth, choking back the words.
Some one was coming through the door, some one who had to bend so much that for a startled moment the girls were not at all sure but what it was an animal, after all, and not a man that they had to reckon with.
Then the visitor stood up and they saw with real relief that it was a man after all. As a matter of fact, after the first startled minute it was the newcomer who seemed frightened and the girls who tried to make him feel at home.
At first sight of the girls the man staggered backward and came up with a thump against the wall of the hut. From there he regarded them with eyes that fairly bulged from his head.
“Hullo!” he muttered, “who are you?”
The girls stared for a moment, then Laura giggled. Who could be frightened when a person wanted to know who they were?
He was a queer looking man. He was tall, over six feet, and so thin that the skin seemed to be drawn over the bones. His shoulders slumped and his arms hung loosely, whether from weariness or discouragement or laziness, the girls found it impossible to tell.
But it was his eyes that they noticed even in that moment of excitement. They were big, much too big for his thin face, and so dark that they seemed deep-sunken. And the expression was something that the girls remembered long afterward. It was brooding, haunted, mysterious, with a little touch of wildness that frightened the girls. Yet his mouth was kind, very kind, and looking at it, the girls ceased to be afraid.
“Who are you?” the man repeated, and this time Billie found her voice.
“We—we got lost,” she said hesitatingly, speaking more to the kind mouth of the man than to the strange, wild eyes. “It began to rain——”