THAT night five men sat on the porch of the one tavern in Hamilton. Of these, one was the landlord, a spare, caustic New Englander who understood his business and left it to his wife to do the agreeable. Of the remaining four, two were the inevitable loungers to be found around all such places at nightfall, and the other two, wayfarers who had taken up lodgings for the night. The dog lying contentedly at the feet of one of these latter tells us who he was.

The talk was on local subjects and included more or less gossip. Who had started it? No one knew; but the least interested person in the group was apparently the man with the dog. He sat and smoked, because it was the hour for sitting and smoking, but he neither talked nor listened,—that is, to all appearance—and when he laughed, as he occasionally did, it was more at some unexpected antic on the part of the dog than at anything which was said in his hearing. But he was old and nobody wondered.

The last subject under discussion was the engagement of a certain young lady to a New York medical student. “Which means, I take it, that Dr. Izard will not continue to have full swing here,” observed one of the stragglers. “Folks say as how her people won’t hear of her leaving home. So he’ll have to come to Hamilton.”

“I sha’n’t lend him my old body to experiment on, if he does,” spoke up the surly landlord. “Dr. Izard is good enough for me.”

“And for me. But the women folks want a change, they say. The doctor is so everlasting queer; and then he’s away so much.”

“That’s because he is so skilful that even the big bugs in Boston and New York too, I hear, want his opinion on their cases. He’s not to blame for that. Great honor, I say, not only to him but to all the town.”

“Great honor, no doubt, but mighty inconvenient. Why, when my wife’s sister was took the other night I run all the way from my house to the doctor’s only to find the door closed and that everlasting placard up at the side: ‘Gone out of town.’ I say it’s a shame, I do, and no other doctor to be found within five miles.”

“You ought to live in Boston. There they have doctors enough.”

“Yet they send for ours.”

“Do you know,” another voice spoke up, “that I had rather go sick till morning, or have one of my folk’s sick, than take that road up by the churchyard after ten o’clock at night. I think it’s the gloomiest, most God-forsaken spot I ever struck in all my life. To think of a doctor living next door to a graveyard. It’s a trifle too suggestive, I say.”

“I wouldn’t care about that if he wasn’t so like a graveyard himself. I declare his look is like a hollow vault. If he wasn’t so smart I’d ’a’ sent for the Wells doctor long ago. I hate long white faces, myself, no matter how handsome they are, and when he touches me with that slender cold hand of his, the shivers go all over me so that he thinks I am struck with a chill. And so I am, but not with a natural one, I vow. If we lived in the olden times and such a man dared come around the death-beds of honest people such as live in this town, he’d have been burnt as a wizard.”

“Come, I won’t hear such talk about a neighbor, let alone a man who has more than once saved the lives of all of us. He’s queer; but who isn’t queer? He lives alone, and cooks and sleeps and doctors all in one room, like the miser he undoubtedly is, and won’t have anything to do with chick or child or man or woman who is not sick, unless you except the village’s protÉgÉe, Polly Earle, whom everybody notices and does for. But all this does not make him wicked or dangerous or uncanny even. That is, to those who used to know him when he was young.”

“And did you?”

“Wa’al, I guess I did, and a handsomer man never walked Boston streets, let alone the lanes of this poor village. They used to say in those days that he thought of marrying, but he changed his mind for some reason, and afterward grew into the kind of man you see. Good cause, I’ve no doubt, for it. Men like him don’t shut themselves up in a cage for nothing.”

“But——”

“Don’t let us talk any more about the doctor,” cried the lodger who did not have a dog. “You spoke of a little girl whom everybody does for. Why is that? The topic ought to be interesting.”

The landlord, who had talked more than his wont, frowned and filled his pipe, which had gone out. “Ask them fellers,” he growled; “or get my wife into a corner and ask her. She likes to spin long stories; I don’t.”

“Oh, I don’t care about asking anybody,” mumbled the stranger, who was a sallow-faced drummer with a weak eye and a sensual mouth. “I only thought——”

“She isn’t for any such as you, if that’s what you mean,” volunteered the straggler, taking up the burden of the talk. “She has been looked after by the village because her case was a hard one. She was an only child, and when she was but four her mother died, after a long and curious illness which no one understood, and three days after, her father—” The dog yelped. As no one was near him but his master, he must have been hurt by that master, but how, it was impossible to understand, for neither had appeared to move.

“Well, well,” cried the sallow young man, “her father——”

“Disappeared. He was last seen at his wife’s funeral; the next day he was not to be found anywhere. That was fourteen years ago, and we know no more now than then what became of him.”

“And the child?”

“Was left without a soul to look after it. But the whole village has taken her in charge and she has never suffered. She has even been educated,—some say by Dr. Izard, but for this I won’t vouch, for he is a perfect miser in his way of living, and I don’t think he would trouble himself to help anybody, even a poor motherless child.”

“Well, if he has spent a penny for her in the past, I don’t think he will be called upon to spend any in the future. I heard yesterday that she has come into a pretty property, and that, too, in a very suspicious way.”

“What’s that? You have? Why didn’t you tell us so before? When a man has news, I say he ought to impart it, and that without any ifs and ands.”

“Well, I thought it would keep,” drawled the speaker, drawing back with an air of importance as all the habituÉs of the place pressed upon him, and even Mrs. Husted, the landlady, stepped out of her sitting-room to listen.

“Wa’al, it won’t,” snarled the landlord. “News, like baked potatoes, must be eaten hot. Where did you hear this about Polly Earle, and what do you mean by suspicious?”

“I mean that this money, and they do say it’s a pretty sum, came to her by will, and that the man who left it was a perfect stranger to her, someone she never heard of before, of that I’ll be bound. He said in his will that he left all this money in payment of an old debt to her father, but that’s all bosh. Ephraim Earle got all the money that was owing to him two weeks before he vanished out of this town, and I say——”

“No matter what you say,” broke in the crabbed landlord. “She’s had money left her, and now she’ll get a good husband, and make a show in the village. I’m glad on it, for one. She’s sung and danced and made merry on nothing long enough. Let her try a little responsibility now, and return some of the favors she has received.”

“Did you hear how much money it was?” timidly asked an old man who had just joined the group.

“It was just the same amount as was paid Ephraim Earle for his invention a few days before we saw the last of him.”

“Lord-a-mercy!”

“And which——”

“Now this is too interesting for anything,” exclaimed a female voice from a window overhead. “Twenty thousand dollars, really? What a romance. I must run and see Polly this minute.”

“Stop her!” came in guttural command from the landlord to his wife.

“And why should I stop her?” asked that good woman, with a jolly roll of her head. “Instead of stopping her, I think I will go with her. But do let us hear more about it first. What was the name of the man who left her this splendid fortune?”

“Abram Hazlitt. Somebody who lived out west.”

From the looks that flew from one to the other and from the doubtful shakes of the head visible on every side, this was, as the speaker had declared, an utterly unknown name. The interest became intense.

“I always thought there was something wrong about Ephraim’s disappearance. No man as good as he would have left a child like that of his own free will.”

“What! do you think this man Hazlitt had anything to do——”

“Hush, hush.”

The monition came from more than one pair of lips; and even the man with the dog looked up. A young lady was coming down the street.

“There she is now.”

“She’s coming here.”

“No; more likely she’s on her way to tell the doctor of her good luck.”

“Look, she has the same old smile.”

“And the same dress.”

“Wa’al she’s pretty, anyhow.”

“And such a sunbeam!”

Yelp! went the dog again. His master had trod on his tail for the second time. Meanwhile the cause of all this excitement had reached the walk in front of the house. Though she was tripping along in a merry fashion which was all her own, she stopped as she met Mrs. Husted’s eye, and, calling her down, whispered something in her ear. Then with a backward nod the young girl passed on, and everyone drew a long breath. There was something so satisfactory to them all in her ingenuous manner and simple expression of youthful delight.

She was a slight girl, and to those who had seen her every day for the last dozen years she was simply prettier than usual, but to the two or three strangers observing her she was a vision of madcap beauty that for the moment made every other woman previously seen forgotten. Her face, which was heart-shaped and fresh as a newly-opened rose, was flushed with laughter, and the dimples which came and went with every breath so distracted the eye that it was not till she had turned her lovely countenance aside that one remembered the violet hues in her heavily-lashed eyes and the hints of feeling which emanated from them. That, with all the dignities of her new-born heirship upon her, she swung a white sunbonnet on her delicate forefinger was characteristic of the girl. The hair thus revealed to sight was of a glistening chestnut, whose somewhat rumpled curls were deliciously in keeping with the saucy poise of the unquiet head. Altogether a decided gleam of sunshine, made all the more conspicuously bright from the hints just given of the tragic history of her parents and the shadows surrounding the very gift which had called up all this pleasure into her face.

“What did she say?” whispered more than one voice as the landlady came slowly back.

“She invited me to visit her, and hinted that she had something to tell me,” was the somewhat important reply.

“And when are you going?” asked one more eager than the rest.

“I may go back with her when she returns from Dr. Izard’s,” was the cool and consequential response. Evidently the landlady had been raised in her own estimation by the notice given her by this former little waif.

“I wonder,” someone now ventured, “if she is going to buy the big house over the doctor’s office. I noticed that the windows were open to-day.”

“Pshaw, and her father’s house lying idle?”

“Her father’s house! Good gracious, would you have the child go there?”

“You make the chills run over me.”

“Nobody would go into that house with her. It hasn’t been opened in fourteen years.”

“The more shame,” growled the landlord.

“She’ll never have anything to do with that. I’ve seen her run by it myself, as if the very shadow it cast was terrifying to her.”

“Yet folks thought it was a cozy home when Ephraim took his young wife there. I remember, myself, the brass andirons in the parlor and the long row of books in the big hall upstairs. To think that those books have never been opened these fourteen years, nor the floors trod on, nor the curtains drawn back! I declare, it’s the most creepy thing of the whole affair.”

“And how do you know that the floor hasn’t been walked on, nor the curtains drawn, since we took the child out from her desolate corner in the old bed-room upstairs?” suggested another voice in an odd, mysterious tone.

“Because the doors were locked and the keys put where no one in the town could get at ’em. We thought it best; there was death on the walls everywhere, and the child had no money to be brought up in any such a grand way as that.”

“Folks as I mean don’t need keys,” murmured the other under his breath. But the suggestion, if it were such, was immediately laughed down.

“You’re a fool, Jacob; we’re in the nineteenth century now, the era of electric lights and trolley cars.”

“I know; I know; but I’ve seen more than once on a dark night the shifting of a light behind those drawn curtains, and once——”

But the laughter was against him and he desisted, and another man spoke up—the lodger with the sallow face: “Why didn’t they sell the old place if the child was left as poor as you say?”

“Why, man, its owner might be living. Ephraim Earle only disappeared, you know, and might have returned any day. Leastwise that is what we thought then. Now, we no longer expect it. I wonder who’ll act as her guardian.”

“She’s of age; she don’t need no guardian.”

“Well, it’s a precious mystery, the whole thing. I wonder if the police won’t see something in it?”

“Bah, police! They had the chance at the thing fourteen years ago. And what did they do with it? Nothing.”

“But now there’s a clue. This man Hazlitt knew what became of Ephraim Earle, or why did he leave that very same amount to his daughter?”

“Lor’ knows. She’s a taking minx and perhaps——”

“Well, perhaps——”

“Hazlitt wasn’t his name, don’t you see?”

This new theory started fresh talk and much excited reasoning, but as it was of the most ignorant sort, it is scarcely worth our while to record it. Meanwhile the twilight gave way to darkness and Polly Earle failed to reappear. When it was quite dark, the stragglers separated, and then it was seen that the man with the dog had fallen asleep in his chair.

Someone strove to wake him.

“Come, come, friend,” said he; “you’ll be getting the rheumatiz if you don’t look out. This isn’t the right kind of air to sleep in.”

The old wayfarer yawned, opened his strange, uneasy eyes, and hobbling to his feet looked lazily up and down the street.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Nine o’clock,” shouted someone.

“Give me a drink, then, and I and my dog will take a walk.” And he drew out a worn wallet, from which he drew a dime, which he handed in through the open window to the now busy landlord.

“Hot,” he croaked, “I’ve got chilly sitting out here in the dew.”

The glass was handed him, and he drank it off with the ease of an accustomed hand.

“I’ll be back before you lock up,” said he, and stepped down into the street, followed by the dog.

“Seems to me I’ve seen that dog before,” remarked someone.

“Why, don’t you know him? That’s old Piper, the dead hermit’s dog. I wonder how this fellow got hold of him.”