"I was looking for Miss Mary," he said, and he glowered on Charles, who had resumed his chair and taken up his knife and fork. Charles thought with lightning swiftness. He did not want to give the man the slightest information, so with a steady, contemptuous stare he simply made no answer.
His manner and silence fairly stunned Frazier, who, in default of anything else to do, simply glared at him for a moment and then turned back toward the veranda. Charles was glad he had taken the course he did, the next moment, for he heard Mary's voice on the veranda speaking to her father. She had slipped out at the kitchen door and had hastily made her way over the grass back to the front.
Charles finished his supper and, having nothing just then to do, he started up to his room. He intended to go to the village as soon as he could leave the house unnoticed, and that meant waiting till the family and the guest had retired. As he was ascending the stairs he heard the angry voice of Frazier raised above a normal tone.
"He simply glared at me when I spoke, sneered and didn't open his lips. Now I tell you that if it hadn't been here in your house, Mr. Rowland, I'd have given him a licking that he would remember all his life—a common, roustabout circus tramp acting in such a high and mighty way with me!"
Charles heard Rowland's faint voice in response, but failed to catch his words. It was ten o'clock before he heard the others go to their rooms, and he waited half an hour afterward before stealing down the stairs and starting on his walk to the village.
CHAPTER XXI
The following morning Charles went to his work after breakfasting alone. Aunt Zilla said the others were not yet up. From his corn-field he saw Frazier lead his horse up to the gate and hitch it to his buggy, which had been left there. Presently Mary came out, and was assisted into the vehicle. Frazier attentively tucked the lap-robe about her feet, waved a parting hand to Rowland at the gate, and they drove away. The buggy seat was a narrow one and the couple had to sit close together. Frazier, in a very loutish way, had dropped his right foot over the edge of the buggy, and it was swinging to and fro close to the wheels, like a pendulum.
"I want to warn you and your father both against that fellow," he was saying to the thought-immersed girl, who, pale and rigid, sat by his side. "I am sure there is something crooked about him. He has all the earmarks of a suspicious character. I have helped my brother in several detective cases and I never saw a man I suspected more. It is not all groundless, either, little girl. You see, the last time I was here to stay all night I heard him coming in away after midnight, slipping up the stairs with his shoes in his hand, and this morning between two and three he did the same thing. The first time I stopped him with my gun in my hand, but this morning I let him pass. I intend to give him plenty of rope and watch him. Some suspicious characters were connected with the circus he left, and my frank opinion is that this Brown dropped off here, and is working on your place merely as a blind to cover up some shady game."
"You say you heard him come in this morning between two and three?" Mary said, wonderingly. "Are you not mistaken?"