He seized Millard by the arm and led him down the sidewalk to the shelter of a clump of lilacs at the end of the Clark picket fence.
“Now tell me what you are talking about,” he commanded.
Millard told him. Mrs. Tobias Eldridge had seen Esther pass the house one afternoon and had wondered where the girl was going. Two days later she saw her pass again and this time her curiosity had prompted her to go out by the back door and to the knoll behind the henhouse from which she could look up the beach. She had seen Esther knock at the door of the shanty and had heard Bob Griffin’s greeting. She told her husband and he, a few days later, mentioned it to Clark.
“Naturally I was consider’bly interested,” went on Millard. “Tobias he couldn’t make out what she was doin’ there and neither could I. ‘Looks to me,’ says I, ‘as if—me bein’ her uncle—I ought to know the ins and outs of this. You’ve got a spare key to that shanty, ain’t you, Tobias? Can’t we make out to get in there to-morrow mornin’ before Bob shows up?’ Well, we did and I saw that picture of Esther. Pretty good, ’tis, too, considerin’ who made it. I own up I was surprised. ’Bout as big as life, you know, and all colored up, and—”
“Ssh!... Humph!... How many people have you told about this?”
“Not a soul! Honest, Cap’n Foster, I swear I haven’t told a livin’ soul. And Tobias hasn’t told neither. ‘The way I look at it,’ he says to me, ‘it ain’t any of my business, nor my wife’s. I’m not runnin’ across Foster Townsend’s bows,’ he says, ‘not much. I’ve told you, Mil, because you’re one of the family. You can do what you want to about it. If I was you, though, I guess I’d keep still.’ ‘You bet I will!’ I told him. But, of course, I knew you ought to know about it, Cap’n Foster. I judged likely you didn’t know, and for Esther Townsend to be in that fish shanty along with one of that Cook tribe seemed to me—”
“Shut up!” The order was savagely given. “Humph! Here! you don’t think others know this, do you?”
“Not a livin’ soul except Tobias and his wife—and me, of course. I haven’t even told Reliance.”
“You keep this to yourself; do you hear? Don’t you mention it again.”
“Oh, I shan’t—I shan’t. But—”