“I guess you’re a stranger in these parts,” he remarked, eying me again,—my knickerbockers no doubt marking me as an alien.
“Quite so. My name is Glenarm, and I’ve just come.”
“I thought you might be him. We’ve rather been expecting you here in the village. I’m John Morgan, caretaker of the resorters’ houses up the lake.”
“I suppose you all knew my grandfather hereabouts.”
“Well, yes; you might say as we did, or you might say as we didn’t. He wasn’t just the sort that you got next to in a hurry. He kept pretty much to himself. He built a wall there to keep us out, but he needn’t have troubled himself. We’re not the kind around here to meddle, and you may be sure the summer people never bothered him.”
There was a tone of resentment in his voice, and I hastened to say:
“I’m sure you’re mistaken about the purposes of that wall. My grandfather was a student of architecture. It was a hobby of his. The house and wall were in the line of his experiments, and to please his whims. I hope the people of the village won’t hold any hard feelings against his memory or against me. Why, the labor there must have been a good thing for the people hereabouts.”
“It ought to have been,” said the man gruffly; “but that’s where the trouble comes in. He brought a lot of queer fellows here under contract to work for him, Italians, or Greeks, or some sort of foreigners. They built the wall, and he had them at work inside for half a year. He didn’t even let them out for air; and when they finished his job he loaded ’em on to a train one day and hauled ’em away.”
“That was quite like him, I’m sure,” I said, remembering with amusement my grandfather’s secretive ways.
“I guess he was a crank all right,” said the man conclusively.