It was that night that another house near the Club was robed, and everything taken, including groceries and a case of champane. The Summer People got together the next day at the Club and offered a reward of two hundred dollars, and engaged a night watchman with a motor-cycle, which I considered silly, as one could hear him coming when to miles off, and any how he spent most of the time taking the maids for rides, and broke an arm for one of them.
Jane spent the night with me, and being unable to sleep, owing to dieting again and having an emty stomache, wakened me at 2 A.M. and we went to the pantrey together. When going back upstairs with some cake and canned pairs, we heard a door close below. We both shreiked, and the Familey got up, but found no one except Leila, who could not sleep and was out getting some air. They were very unpleasant, but as Jane observed, families have little or no gratitude.
I come now to the Stranger again.
On the next afternoon, while engaged in a few words with the station hackman, who said I was taking his trade although not needing the Money—which was a thing he could not possably know—while he had a familey and a horse to feed, I saw the Stranger of the milk wagon, et cetera, emerge from the one-thirty five.
He then looked at a piece of mauve note paper, and said:
“How much to take me up the Greenfield Road?”
“Where to?” I asked in a pre-emptory manner.
He then looked at a piece of mauve note paper, and said:
“To a big pine tree at the foot of Oak Hill. Do you know the Place?”
Did I know the Place? Had I not, as a child, rolled and even turned summersalts down that hill? Was it not on my very ancestrial acres? It was, indeed.