But Ned had no answer. If things were as he feared, they were as powerless to aid Mr. Lockyer as if they had been on another planet.
“Are we nearing the hotel now?” asked Mr. Lockyer, as the bearded man, after an hour’s rowing, still bent to his oars.
“She’s right off thar among them trees,” was the rejoinder. The boatman jerked his thumb over his shoulder and indicated a dark grove of sombre evergreens along the shore. They stood out blackly against the night sky.
Some distance behind them twinkled the lights of Grayport, but between the dark clump of trees and the village there were no cheerful lights to mark human habitations. As Ned had said, it was an isolated place, indeed.
“I half wish I had investigated this man Armstrong a little more before I set off on this mission,” thought Mr. Lockyer, “or, at least, that I had brought some one with me. What if this should be a trap to rob me or to—oh, pshaw! I’m getting nervous. Of course, Gradbarr, if he is in the neighborhood, would not be residing in the center of a village. Then the police will be there, too.”
Before long the boatman ran the little craft alongside a mouldering wharf, once intended as the pier of the abandoned hotel. Making fast the painter, he gruffly directed the inventor to step ashore.
“Mr. Armstrong will be waiting at the end of the wharf,” he said.
Channing Lockyer’s steps rang out hollowly on the deserted wharf as he stepped shoreward toward the sombre grove of melancholy trees, among which he could now make out the outlines of the hotel, a huge barn-like edifice pierced with many dark windows. The wind sighed in a weird way through the grove as he approached. He had now reached the end of the wharf and still no sign of Armstrong was apparent.
“I’ll ask the boatman where he was to be,” thought Mr. Lockyer.