For some time Ralph floundered and stumbled along the beach in the direction which he had elected to follow. At length, as he rounded a point, he caught sudden sight of a light, burning amid a clump of stunted, dwarfed cedar trees.
“Good!” he exclaimed. “Where there’s a light there’s a promise, anyhow, of a fire and something to eat. Eat! I’ve almost forgotten what the word means, and as for sleep——”
Ralph’s lips parted in an expansive yawn.
“Oh, for a bed! I could sleep the clock round, I do declare,” he confessed to himself.
With the light as an inspiring goal, he pushed forward vigorously along the beach, wondering to himself, meanwhile, if Hansen and Malvin had reached a place of refuge.
“At any rate, they don’t deserve one,” he thought. “Their desertion of me was a base bit of business. If they have to stay out to-night with the stars for a counterpane and the earth for a cot, I, for one, have no great sympathy for them.”
In due time he reached the place from which he had perceived the light shining through the night. So far as he could see, it was a rough-looking shanty, built of driftwood and old timbers nailed or fastened together in haphazard fashion. The light was proceeding from a small window and, peering in through this, Ralph was able to see a very old man seated at a rough table, apparently repairing a fish net.
“I’ve heard strange stories about some of these squatters along the St. Lawrence,” said the boy to himself, as he hesitated outside the door. “I hardly know if I ought to knock or not. Suppose this is some maliciously disposed old hermit, like that one we met down in Texas?”
He hesitated thus for several minutes; but at last he mustered up the resolution to knock on the door.
He struck a good thundering tattoo with his knuckles, and was immediately rewarded by hearing a voice from within. It was querulous, old and cracked. Plainly, it belonged to just such an old man as he had seen seated at the table when he looked through the window. He was an old, bald-headed, patriarchal-looking man.