After supper they had made their way to the foundry. From the door of the smelting furnace a huge red beam shot out into the evening twilight, throwing into strong relief the figures of the workmen, who with their puddling-irons were turning the molten streams into the rough sand moulds.
The twins stood there talking softly to one another.
"I say, George," said William, "isn't it time we went back to the house, think ye?"
"Oh, I don't know," replied the other. "Let's go around to the pond first. We'll see if there's anything in the traps."
They darted out of the glare of the furnaces and climbed the fence into the road. The pond lay still and quiet in the shadowy gray light, and the twins carefully picked their way across the dam and entered a clump of alders on the other side.
They had not gone more than a dozen steps when a strange apparition appeared to rise out of the very mud at their feet. A tall bent figure with long hair hanging down over its broad shoulders, a pair of deep-set, restless eyes, and a large good-humored mouth, parted in a grin.
"How!" said the apparition, in a deep chest tone.
The boys had recovered from their sudden start. "How, Adam!" they returned.
Adam Bent Knee was one of the few surviving members of the once powerful tribe of Indians that had years before harassed the settlers of New Jersey, and had moved northward and westward before the advancing tide of civilization, leaving a few of its descendants to earn a precarious existence by fishing and trading in small ways with the whites.
The boys had long known the old Indian, and had often greeted him as he passed through the woods tending his traps, or bringing strings of fish down to the settlement to be exchanged for tobacco or a few ounces of sugar. He seldom spoke to the older people, but he always had seemed glad to meet the twins.