THE HERMIT OF QUASI

The newcomer was a man of fifty or fifty-five years of age. He was slender, but rather with the slenderness of the red Indian than with that suggestive of weakness. Indeed, the boys observed that his muscles seemed to be developed out of proportion to his frame, as if he had been intended by nature for a scholar and had made an athlete of himself instead.

There was not an ounce of unnecessary fat upon his person, and yet he gave no sign of being underfed. Instead his flesh had the peculiar hardness of the frontiersman’s who eats meat largely in excess of other foods.

A little strip across the upper part of his forehead, which showed as he stood there with his hat removed, suggested that his complexion had once been fair, but that exposure had tanned it to the color of a saddle.

His costume was an odd one, but it was made of the best of materials, now somewhat worn, but fit still to hold their own in comparison with far newer garments of cheaper quality. Perhaps they were aided in this by the fact that they had evidently been made for him by some tailor who knew how to make clothes set upon their wearer as if they were a part of him.

Yet his dress was perfectly simple. He wore a sort of Norfolk jacket of silk corduroy—a cloth well nigh as durable as sole leather—with breeches of the same, buttoned at and below the knee, and covered at bottom with close-fitting calf-skin leggings of the kind that grooms and dandy horsemen affect.

The hat he held in his hand, as he addressed the company that had courteously risen to receive him, was an exceedingly limp felt affair, soft to the head, light in weight and capable of assuming any shape its wearer might choose to give it. His shoes were Indian moccasins.

No sign of linen appeared anywhere about his person, but just above the top button of his jacket a bit of gray flannel shirt showed in color harmony with his other garments.

“Good evening, young gentlemen,” he said; “I trust I do not intrude, and if I do so it shall not be for long. My name is Rudolf Dunbar. May I ask if you young gentlemen are the rescuers I have been hoping to see during the three or four weeks that I have been marooned on this peninsula which nobody seems ever to visit?”

“We are here to rescue you if you so desire,” answered Larry, “but we set out with no such purpose. We were on our way here to fish, hunt, live in the open air and be happy in natural ways for a time. We caught sight of your signal of distress and hurried ourselves as much as possible, fearing that your distress might be extreme. As we found your camp showing no signs of starvation or illness, and could not find you, we set to work to establish ourselves for a prolonged stay here and wait for you to return. It seemed the only thing to do under the circumstances.”

“Quite right! Quite right! and I thank you for your kindly impulse. But you should have taken possession of my camp, making it your own—at least until you could establish yourselves more to your liking. I don’t know, though—my camp is bare of everything, so that you’re better off as you are.”

As he paused, Larry introduced himself and his comrades by name, and offered the stranger the hospitality of their camp, inviting him especially to sit down and share their supper.

He accepted the invitation, and after a little Larry said to him:

“May I ask the nature of your distress here, and how pressing it is? We are ready, of course, to take you to the village over yonder, ten or a dozen miles away, at any time you like. From there you can go anywhere you please.”

“Thank you very much. My distress is quite over now. Indeed, I am not accustomed to let circumstances distress me overmuch. I found myself marooned here, and naturally I wanted to establish communication with the mainland again—or the possibility of such communication. But if it had been necessary I could have remained here for a year in fair contentment. Long experience has taught me how to reconcile myself with my surroundings, whatever they may be, and game and fish are plentiful here. May I ask how long you young gentlemen have planned to remain here?”

“Three or four weeks, probably,” answered Larry. “But as I said before, we’ll set you ashore on the mainland at any time you like.”

“Thank you very much. But if it will be quite agreeable to you, I’ll remain here as long as you do. I haven’t finished my work here, and the place is extremely favorable for my business. If my presence is in any way annoying—”

“Oh, not at all. We shall build a comfortable shelter to-morrow, and we’ll be glad to have you for our guest. As you see, we’re digging a well, and we’ll have good sweet water by morning.”

“That is very wise. I should have dug one myself if I had had any sort of implement to dig with, but I have none.”

“And so you’ve had to get on with the rather repulsive water from the spring down there?”

“Yes, and no. I have used that water, but I distil it first. You see, in my peculiar business, I must wander in all sorts of places, wholesome and unwholesome, and it is often impossible to find good water to drink. So for years past I have always carried a little distilling apparatus of my own devising with me. It is very small and very light, and, of course, when I have to depend upon it for a water supply, I must use water very sparingly. I think I must bid you good evening now, as I did not sleep at all last night. I will see you in the morning.”

“We’ll expect you to join us at breakfast,” said Larry.

“It will give me great pleasure to do so. Good night.”

With that he nimbly tripped away, leaving the boys to wonder who and what he was, and especially what the “business” was that he had not yet finished at Quasi. Cal interrupted the chatter presently, saying:

“We’ve annexed a riddle, and you’re wasting time trying to guess it out. Nobody ever did guess the answer to a riddle. Let’s get to work and finish the well.”

The boys set to work, of course, but they did not cease to speculate concerning the stranger. Even after the well was finished and when they should all have been asleep they could not drive the subject from their minds.

“I wonder how he got here, anyhow,” said Tom, after all the other subjects of wonder had been discussed to no purpose. “He has no boat and he couldn’t have got here without one.”

“What I wonder,” said Dick, “is why and how his ‘business’ has compelled him to wander in out-of-the-way places, as he says he has.”

“I am wondering,” said Cal, sleepily, “when you fellows will stop talking and let me go to sleep. You can’t find out anything by wondering and chattering. The enigma will read itself to us very soon.”

“Do you mean he’ll tell us his story?” asked Tom.

“Yes, of course.”

“Why do you think he’ll do that?”

“He can’t possibly help it. When a man lives alone for so long as he has done, he must talk about himself. It’s the only thing he knows, and the only thing that seems to him interesting.”

“There’s a better reason than that,” said Larry.

“What is it?”

“Why, that he is obviously a gentleman. A gentleman wouldn’t think of coming here to remain indefinitely as our guest without letting us know who and what he is and all the rest of it.”

“Finis!” said Cal.

Silence followed, and soon the little company was dreaming of queerly dressed marooners carrying flags union down.