“I’ll tell you why I know there’s someone up there,” Swen went on presently. “I’ve got a little store down by the end of the harbor. Four times that store has been entered. Things have been taken. Not stolen; just taken and the money left to pay for them. The first three times it was food they took. The last time it was a grinding stone for polishing greenstone. Cost me five dollars. The five was there. Can you beat that?”
“But your store is on the other side of the island,” Florence had protested. “That’s another place entirely. We’re not going there.”
“It’s all the same ridge,” Swen explained, patiently. “When you come to the tip-top of the ridge and if you go far enough toward the center of the island—not so far, either—you can look down on Duncan’s Bay on your side and upon our harbor on the other.
“And up there somewhere,” he added with conviction, “there’s someone. I know it! He took things from our store.”
Florence had thought of Greta’s phantom. Could it be that there truly was someone living on this ridge? And would they discover that person?
“He pays for things he takes. He is honest,” she argued to herself. “He loves music. No true musician could be unkind or brutal.”
“But, after all,” she had insisted, turning her face to Swen, “after all, there is no one. A boat came along at night. The people in the boat took the things from your store.”
“Came in a boat, that’s what I thought at first.” The light of mystery shone in the fisherman’s eye. “But the last time, that time he took the grinding wheel and left the five dollars in gold, there was a storm on old Superior, a terrible nor-easter. No one could have lived in that sea. And there wasn’t so much as a rowboat in the harbor.
“And that person don’t live on the shore, either,” he went on after a moment. “Know every boat of the shore, I do. Naturally, then, they’re up there on Greenstone Ridge somewhere, someone is, that’s certain.”
“How—how long ago?” The words had stuck in Florence’s throat.