“No,” responded Mr. Carleton. “Still, I might like to. But please don’t say anything about it.”
“Oh, no,” replied the squire, chuckling to himself. Mr. Carleton, bidding him good night and taking his departure, was more than ever an object of interest to the squire. Here was a man that spoke in the most casual and nonchalant way of investing twenty-five hundred dollars in a piece of land that he liked, and of buying a fifteen-hundred-dollar boat. The squire’s curiosity, always keen in other persons’ affairs, was aroused. He wondered—in the usual trend of such personal curiosity—how the other man had made his money.
This curiosity was not abated, to say the least, by a comparatively trifling incident that occurred a day or two following. The squire had, in the cupola of his house, which he used as a vantage-point for surveying the bay far out to sea, and the surrounding country up and down the island, a large telescope. It was a powerful glass, with which he could “pick up” a vessel away down among the islands, and read the name on the stern of one a mile away. The squire had some interests in several small schooners plying between the coast cities and Benton, and was in the habit of going up to his lookout two or three times each day.
On this particular occasion, the squire, after sweeping the bay with the glass, turned it inland and took a look down the island. He could distinguish several familiar wagons passing along the main road, but nothing unusual. But, when he happened to turn the glass almost directly back inland from the direction of the town, he caught an object in its sweep that arrested his attention. It was the figure of his new acquaintance, Mr. Carleton, leaning against some pasture bars about a quarter of a mile away, intently reading a letter.
There was surely nothing unusual nor exciting about this, and yet the squire was interested. Perhaps it was due just to the novelty of observing a man a quarter of a mile away, reading a letter, when he could by no possibility be aware that he was being observed.
But if the squire’s attention was drawn to Mr. Carleton in the act of reading the letter, it was certainly doubled and trebled when the latter, having finished his perusal of it, waved the letter in a seemingly triumphant manner about his head and then tore it into many little pieces and dropped the pieces at his feet. Squire Brackett, through the spy-glass, watched Mr. Carleton come down through the fields toward the village.
He knew the exact spot to the inch where Mr. Carleton had stood. It was at the bars that divided a pasture belonging to the postmaster and a piece of town property. The squire shut the sliding glass windows that protected his lookout, hurried out-of-doors, walked briskly up through the fields, making a detour to avoid meeting Mr. Carleton, and arrived, somewhat short of breath, at the bars. He gathered up the pieces of the letter carefully. He put them into his coat-pocket, and walked briskly back to his house.
He hadn’t got them all, for the wind had carried some away. But the letter had evidently been a brief one. When the squire took the pieces out that afternoon at his desk in a little room that he called his office, there were only eleven scraps that he could assemble. Mr. Carleton had torn the letter into small bits.
The squire was disappointed. He had hoped to gratify his curiosity and be able to pry into Mr. Carleton’s private affairs a little. And withal, there were two words that interested him greatly and made his disappointment all the more keen. These were two words that followed, one the other, in the sequence in which they had been written. They were the words, “aboard yacht.” All the others had been so separated in the destruction of the letter that the squire despaired of ever being able to make anything out of them, or to restore them to anything like their original consecutive form.
However, he arranged the words and scraps of words by pasting them on a sheet of paper, as follows: