As warmth in a dying man, so life in the village of Kilmarnock had retreated from the extremities. Gray cabins stood for the most part with sunken roof and yawning window; here and there, where a wall had fallen out, they exposed, as for the stage purposes of some unacted melodrama, the intimacy of all their little rooms at once,—the ragged wallpaper, the zigzag mounting scar of stairs long vanished, the hearthstones choked, in winter with snow, as now with autumn chickweed. Beyond these dead environs, a brook, with cool and hearty noises, tumbled out of its brown alder-shadow to halt, slacken, and wriggle in a delta of deep-channeled rivulets through seaweed and long mud-flats. And here, where fairy falls descended to that vile foreshore, the heart of the village beat feebly in a half-dozen houses, weather-silvered.

In the post-office,—a littered, gloomy shed which was also carpenter’s shop, wheel-wright’s factory, and woolen mill,—a few sad old men sat always, talking slowly and vaguely; while underneath, the roaring brook made the floor-boards vibrate, and flashed through chinks and knot-holes the whiteness of cascade foam.

“Mornin’, Miles,” wheezed Mr. Quinn, the postmaster. An elephantine man,—old Mr. Bissant called him Quinbus Flestrin, after the man-mountain Gulliver,—he rummaged with slow, fat hands in Her Majesty’s salt-box. “Here’s that letter you folks be’n waitin’ for,” he puffed. “Didn’t know you had relations over there, neither. Poor hand they write, I must say. Oh, now I ketch it! ‘A. Florio, Es-quair.’ That’s him that’s stayin’ up to your place, ain’t it?”

Miles nodded, all impatience.

“‘Care of Richard Bissant, Es-quair,’” read Quinbus gravely, holding the letter at different lengths of focus. “Say, they tell me he ain’t a boarder, after all! Now, I thought he might be a rusticator, like the city feller to Lovat’s that’s got the narvous prostrates. They say his fingers fidges dretful, that feller.”

Miles listened politically, and was at last rewarded with Tony’s letter.

“Hear ye got noo neighbors down your way,” began Quinbus, but his auditor escaped.His news, moreover, went unheeded; for in three steps down the grass-ribbed street Miles overtook a surprise. A little man trundling a keg of nails in a barrow set down the handles with a sigh, and turned. His hair was grayer, his cheek engraved with deeper lines, his aspect less cheerful and thriving; but the swart face and shifting black eyes were those of Abram the Magician.

It was like a piece of boyhood restored. Halting, Miles ventured the question,—

“Isn’t your name Tucker, sir?”

“What if ’tis?” growled the man, defiant and suspicious.

“Oh, nothing,” rejoined Miles, taken aback. “Only I rode your mare Jubilee once—”

“Dessay,” snapped Abram. He spat on his hands, stooped to the shafts of his barrow, and growled, “Lots o’ lummockses did. Damn ’er hide! Dunno that’s reason to hender a man’s work.”

“Or to be uncivil,” Miles retorted stiffly, taking a leaf from his grandfather’s book of pride. But it was with a chuckle that he passed on, and swung into the path along the shore.

It was a bright Saturday morning of late September. Across the border a thin haze of forest fires, from “back lots” far behind the river hills, veiled the high, resolute contours of the American shore; but in all other quarters the air shone clear and buoyant, mellow but cordial, like the sweetness of a frosty apple. Goldenrod along his path had ripened to a higher, drier yellow; seaweed on the rocks below—that turned the broad flats into a “rookery” of shaggy forms, petrified in the act of basking—seemed to have lost the greenish tinge from its leathern brown; ahead, down the sparkling vista of the river, the bay, by a sleight of mirage, raised islands a hair’s-breadth above the horizon, till beneath them sea and sky joined with that pale, stretched continuity seen in downward-parting drops. A world unclouded and untroubled: yet the sky held the growing whiteness that foreruns autumnal wind, and a loon, winging high with bedlam laughter, steered his flight by the flight of an unrisen gale.

Miles loitered, yet was busy rather with thought than sight. What could bring Abram to Kilmarnock? The fat postmaster would have not only mentioned a “show,” but discussed it tediously; where, then, were Terry and Jubilee, and Madge the Seeress, and the little barefoot girl? His sudden sharp curiosity, above all on this last head, astonished him. Why should he care?—yet he continued to speculate.

His path skirted among sweet-fern, mullein, and pink granite. The little fir promontory, roughly double-serrate like the edge of an elm leaf, suddenly hid the upper lighthouse, for shore and path bent sharp into Alward’s Cove. Here a deserted house stood at the grassy mouth of an ancient watercourse; and behind it, a grove of slender white birches had already begun to shed yellow leaves, which so carpeted the dark, strait hollow that a sunlight seemed to glow faintly upward.

Suddenly Miles saw that new shingles patched the cabin, and that from the chimney curled blue wisps of smoke. A battered “punt” lay hauled above the thin rubbish line of high water. But what most deeply surprised him, the beginnings of a weir straggled down the beach. He laughed aloud. The stakes were freshly driven, but the cedar poles green-coated with many tides; on old material the builder had exerted an inexperience glaring even in these first few yards; and more than all, Alward’s Cove, a narrow cleft half a mile above low water, was for a weir the worst possible situation.

Glancing up at the patched house, he cut his laughter short. Behind the panes a girl’s face vanished into the gloom. The features he could not have sworn to, but the hair shone indubitably bright. Ashamed to be caught mocking her weir, he set out again briskly; and he had rounded the little promontory before confusion cleared into the surprising knowledge that he was glad of something. These were the neighbors of whom Quinbus would have told; the keg of nails was for that absurd, futile weir; and her hair was of the color of winter oak leaves. Why, again, should he care?—but care he did, even to excitement, with an obscure feeling that his acts, even his thoughts, now had as it were a witness, and that now any day could promise pleasant and unexpected turns. He could not account for this glowing satisfaction,—that some one had become mysteriously involved and identified, in his mind, with the bright, volatile strangeness of autumn.

On the doorsteps at home, Tony smoked his pipe.

“Ah, the beggar’s written at last,” he grumbled; then unfolding a single sheet, read it calmly, without comment. Miles, who had always vaguely connected this coming letter with “enemies made at sea,” was disappointed to see no more change in Florio’s dark face than in his later behavior.

Weeks passed without incident. Miles went daily to the village for mail which was never there, and of which the sailor declared no expectation. He returned down river always by the shore path—“to see how the weir gets along,” he told himself stubbornly. It got along slowly, from bad to worse. Sometimes he saw the magician, far out, ankle-deep in mud, hammering stakes, or weaving brush wattles into his foredoomed structure. Once the blue of a calico dress moved among the white birch pillars. Speech of his new neighbors, however, or nearer view, he did not get. No face lurked behind the window-pane. And at home the fir headland sundered them as effectually as the rim of a hemisphere.

One night, at his nine-o’clock visit to the upper light, he paused for a time in the lamp-room, his back to the glare, looking out into the dark. Something—perhaps the silence of the evening, the calm, so great that the other tower’s light pierced the water deeply, like an inverted point of exclamation—induced lonely and melancholy thoughts. As he stood thus, a sound rose through the open trap-door. Something stirred, thinly and dryly, on the stairs below.

At first like faintly tearing silk, or scuffing sand-paper, it mounted. Footsteps, thought Miles; yet such footsteps as he had never heard, uncertain, soft, and of a person neither shod nor barefoot.

They stopped. A harsh yet guarded call followed. If speech, it was no human tongue. Miles waited, in a profound silence. A voice called in strange sing-song; then nearer, chanting what sounded like a fragment of barbarous melody.

Portuguese and Italian sailors Miles had seen, on rare visits aboard some lumber schooner bound for Sicily or the Canary Islands. At Admiral’s Light, however, nothing could bring them ashore, still less up into the tower. And this sing-song gabble, as instinct told him, came from no Latin throat.

The dry, scuffing steps began once more. Suddenly, out of the darkness, claw-like fingers clutched the sides of the trap-door,—fingers of an impossible, horny yellow, ending in blue talons.

For one spasmodic instant, Miles, had he stood on open ground, might have bolted. Then as up from a pit, a reassuring black felt hat bobbed through the opening, and tilted back to disclose a human face. Eyes hard and bright as black glass peered from under lids curiously in-folded, of double thickness; the saffron cheeks were smooth as a babe’s; and indeed, in that strange face, as in a changeling’s, baby innocence conflicted with reptilian age and wisdom. Without alteration, without sound, it rested there for a moment, at the level of the floor, as though decapitated; then sank from sight.

Miles had stared in fascination. Waking to anger, part at his own fear, part at its cause, he shouted:—

“Stop! Who—what are you after?”

The light scuffing descended rapidly. Miles leapt for the black square, plunged through it, and down the twisting stair. The thin scantling shook and buckled under their double weight. He jumped the lower steps, just as the tower door slammed open to let a black figure bound out into the lantern light. A scurrying pair of thick white soles, as he caught up the lantern by the bail, guided his pursuit; he gained on them, and running his hardest to the gully bridge, gripped in his right hand the fluttering fullness of a silken jacket.

“Stop!” he cried. “You—”

The fugitive tugged, wriggled, surrendered, and turned a grinning face.

“No can do,” he panted, nodding and ducking amiably. The felt hat was gone, and his bobbing crown showed a high, shaven forehead, bound with neat black coils of braided hair. “But in pictures they hang down,” thought Miles. “A queue!” He had never before seen a Chinaman.

“What do you want?” he asked severely.

His captive, smiling and nodding, the calmer of the two, repeated,—

“No can do, no can do.”

Plainly, the man’s English went no further. Miles released his grip, and, feeling rather foolish, stepped back to consider. Like a spring released, and with instant, mechanical precision, the Chinaman vaulted the bridge-rail, landed on the steep bank below, and darted upward, crashing into the alders. His escape, like his first appearance, had the facility of acts in a dream.

Flushed and bewildered, Miles was halfway home before he regained the use of reason. At a clap the thought overtook him, What if this were Tony’s “foreign-looking” enemy? “I’d better make sure first,” he told himself; and sitting by the library fire, he kept as thoughtful a silence as his grandfather and the sailor, perched, with intent faces, over their chessmen.

At bedtime, he stepped across into Florio’s little room.

“News for you,” he began quietly, and continued in an undertone. Florio’s hard gray eyes watched him sharply across the candle flame, with a look which meant, if anything, impatient anger.

An explosive whisper was the only comment: “Damn the coolie!” Pocketing his big fists with one energetic shove, the sailor stared down at the floor.

“Thanks all the same, of course,” he said moodily. “Quite right. That’s the chap I was afraid might turn up. Thanks. Don’t speak of him to anybody else, till I say so, will you? Not a word? That’s right.”

He sat down on his bed, and unwound his leggings, neatly, methodically, as though the affair were dropped.

In some surprise, Miles continued it.

“Then I’ll do my turns to-night, and afterward—the lamps.”

“Eh?” The sailor looked up, half startled, half chagrined. “What’s that?—Oh,” he smiled indulgently, “not much! Get to bed, boy. What, I’m not afraid of that swine! Alone, isn’t he? Let me lay aboard him once, that’s all! Can catch! No, I won’t hear a word of it. Your watch below. To bed!”

By no persuasion would he forego his self-set labor, or accept company, even for the single night. “Dear chap, I have some pride,” he reiterated; and as he offered no confidences, Miles left him with disappointment. Yet his cool, stubborn attitude seemed, in a way, admirable; and—to judge from deep, contented breathing, across the corridor—he slept like a child.

Somewhere after midnight, Miles woke uneasily. Long security had broken the habit; but now he sat up once more, to watch the distant light of Tony’s lantern jerking in fitful eclipse among the firs. Near the second tower it disappeared, as usual; and as usual, after a short pause shining out again, returned down river, skipping and winking.

Suddenly it went out, and shone no more.

Miles crept from bed to window, and watched. He counted off three, four, five minutes, and saw not another gleam. Dismayed, blaming himself for suffering Tony to have his way, he wrestled into clothes, stole downstairs, and raced through the sharp night air. Thin fog, shoulder-high, had just begun to billow along the ground, concealing and magnifying, even by starlight. Each tussock, each baby fir, loomed like a waiting figure or stretched like a dead body. Silent over the wet grass, Miles ran downhill toward the spot where the light had ceased.

Nearing the shore, he brushed through the chill aspersion of bristling thickets, when suddenly the light gleamed again, fixed, through the lowest boughs. He stopped, listened, then slipped forward cautiously, toward a murmur of voices. Subdued but unmistakable, it was the broken sing-song of that speech from the other side of the world. He threaded without a sound the interstitial windings of the underbrush, and crouched at the edge of the clearing.

On the old quarter-deck, the lantern burned dimly. As in a luminous smoke, two men sat talking, with now and then a gesture that set enormous hands, outspread fingers, wavering on the magic-lantern screen of the fog. Their alien tones rose and fell, in a quiet, scolding incantation.

The more vehement speaker was Tony. Facing him, oddly squatting upon heels, the yellow man of the tower nodded continually, amicably, sagely, like a toy mandarin.