"I suppose Mr. Hartridge is absent sometimes; he doesn't live down there all the time, does he?"
"I can't say that I could prove it; sometimes I don't see him for a month or more; but his business is his own, stranger," he concluded pointedly.
"You think that if Mr. Hartridge had a visitor you'd know it?" I persisted, though the shopkeeper grew less amiable.
"Well, now I might; and again I mightn't. Mr. Hartridge is a queer man. I don't see him every day, and particularly in the winter I don't keep track of him."
With a little leading the storekeeper described Hartridge for me, and his description tallied exactly with the man who had caught me on the canoe-maker's premises the night before. And yet, when I had thanked the storekeeper and ridden on through the village, I was as much befuddled as ever. There was something decidedly incongruous in the idea that a man who was, by all superficial signs, at least, a gentleman, should be established in the business of making canoes by the side of a lonely creek in this odd corner of the world. From the storekeeper's account, Hartridge might be absent from his retreat for long periods; if he were Henry Holbrook and wished to annoy his sister, it was not so far from this lonely creek to the Connecticut town where Miss Pat lived. Again, as to the daughter, just home from school and not yet familiar to the eyes of the village, she might easily enough be an invention to hide the visits of Helen Holbrook. I found myself trying to account for the fact that, by some means short of the miraculous, Helen Holbrook had played chess with Miss Pat at St. Agatha's at the very hour I had seen her with her father on the Tippecanoe. And then I was baffled again as I remembered that Paul Stoddard had sent the two women to St. Agatha's, and that their destination could not have been chosen by Helen Holbrook.
My thoughts wandered into many blind alleys as I rode on. I was thoroughly disgusted with myself at finding the loose ends of the Holbrooks' affairs multiplying so rapidly. The sun of noon shone hot overhead, and I turned my horse into a road that led homeward by the eastern shore of the lake. As I approached a little country church at the crown of a long hill I saw a crowd gathered in the highway and reined my horse to see what had happened. The congregation of farmers and their families had just been dismissed; and they were pressing about a young man who stood in the center of an excited throng. Drawing closer, I was amazed to find my friend Gillespie the center of attention.
"But, my dear sir," cried a tall, bearded man whom I took to be the minister of this wayside flock, "you must at least give us the privilege of thanking you! You can not know what this means to us, a gift so munificent—so far beyond our dreams."
Whereat Gillespie, looking bored, shook his head, and tried to force his way through the encircling rustics. He was clad in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers of fantastic plaid, with a cap to match.
A young farmer, noting my curiosity and heavy with great news, whispered to me:
"That boy in short pants put a thousand-dollar bill in the collection basket. All in one bill! They thought it was a mistake, but he told our preacher it was a free gift."