The next evening I ran my car over to the point, and rowed across the harbor to the village to get a small shipment of freight which was expected by the late boat.
Meeting the boat is one of the chief summer diversions of us Edgartonions. We line up on each side of the gang plank, and let the arriving summer folk run the gantlet of our scrutiny, and listen (ourselves amused) at their amused comments on the “natives.”
As I stood thus on the evening in question, watching the summer folk walk the plank, I saw among them a strangely familiar face. Could it be? It was none other than my old classmate Myles S. Cabot! In another moment we were shaking hands.
Yet still I was speechless with astonishment. Cabot was the last person in the world that I would have expected to see. I had thought he was on another planet, millions of miles away.
Then came the reaction. If Cabot was still on earth, his story about his adventures on Venus, which I had so recently published to the world, must be nothing but a cleverly concocted lie. The projectile, which had carried the manuscript to my farm, and which I had ingenuously assumed to have been shot from the skies, may merely have been fired over from somewhere on Cape Cod.
The accident of my finding the message had probably not been chance at all, but rather an event planned and intended by Myles Cabot. He had hoaxed me, and I had passed on to the editor and to the unsuspecting general public, a mere faked-up yarn. Think what a position this would place me in, when the editor, who in good faith had accepted my story as a narrative of fact, should discover that Myles was not on Venus at all! Could I ever make any one believe I had been innocent of complicity in this hoax?
I was horrified, and my resentment flared up at my old friend.
“Where have you been all these years since you disappeared from home?” I asked accusingly.
“Why, you know perfectly well,” was his surprised reply, “for you published my account of it.”
“Then what on earth are you doing here?” I countered.