“You go up to your uncle’s, I s’pose, and I go to the life saving station. I am one of the crew there, and it was my turn to be off to–day.”
“There! I thought I had seen you somewhere before.”
“I have seen you there, and you would have known me quicker, perhaps, if I hadn’t shaved off my beard. That alters me somewhat.”
“But it seems to me as if I had seen you before I came this way.”
“Shouldn’t wonder. People meet, you know, under queer circumstances.”
“Hullo, Woodbury,” called out a man dressed like a fisherman, and waiting on the rocks above the strip of sand. “I’ve been here a–waitin’, some time.”
“Then his name is Woodbury,” thought Walter. “I know that much.”
The fisherman sprang into the boat vacated by Woodbury and Walter, and thrusting his oar into the sand, pushed off at once. Woodbury went to the left toward the station, while Walter took the lane to his uncle’s.
“I am very much surprised to know that Mr. Baggs would do anything of the kind,” said Uncle Boardman in his slow, meditative way, when Walter after supper related the affair of the day. Uncle Boardman, as he spoke, worked his fingers nervously, as if they were pencils, with which he was working out a problem on a slate.
“Sur–prised, Boardman?” inquired Aunt Lydia, thrusting forward her sharp features. “You sur–prised? I am not. I don’t think there is anything that mean critter won’t be up to, or down to, rather. I ventur’ to say there’s been queer carryin’s on, if we only knew.” And Aunt Lydia’s sharp face suggested the beak of a bird that was after its prey; and woe be to that worm, the unhappy Baggs, if once before the beak!