The newspapers had a great deal to say about the extraordinary behavior and mysterious disappearance of Major T. V. Akerley, M. C., of the Royal Air Force. Why had he hit Lieutenant-Colonel E. F. Nasher on the point of the chin? That was the question; and no one seemed to be so ignorant of the answer as Colonel Nasher himself. Many young men who possessed pens of ready writers (more or less) and little else dealt lengthily with the problem.

The Press soon came to the conclusion that the major had hit the colonel out of pure cussedness—that a young and distinguished officer had committed assault and battery; insubordination with violence; behavior unbecoming an officer and a gentleman; and desertion coupled with theft of Government property, all in an outburst of causeless and unreasoning temper.

Then military men, demobilized and otherwise, of various arms of the Service and various ranks, began dipping unaccustomed pens on the vanished Akerley’s behalf. One wrote, “I was Major Akerley’s groom when he was a cavalry lieutenant. He was the quietest officer I ever knew. Some of our officers ...; but that Mr. Akerley didn’t even get mad, so’s you’d notice when his batman burnt his boots he’d paid seven guineas for in London. I guess Major Akerley had a reason for doing what he did.”

Many other warriors wrote in the same vein, among them a retired major-general. Much was written of Akerley’s reserve of manner, devotion to duty, skill as an airman and cool courage as a fighter. All these champions had known Akerley in France, of course; and all denied any personal knowledge of Colonel Nasher, whose military activities had not carried him beyond Ottawa.

The result of all this literary effort on the part of the veterans was a very general sympathy, strong and wide-spread, for the run-away Ace—but as neither newspapers nor the faintest echoes of public opinion reach Gaspard’s clearings, Akerley knew nothing of it. The civil and military police continued to scratch their heads, and run finger-tips (not entirely free from splinters) across and around maps of the world, and submit reports to their respective headquarters through the proper channels, with a view to the disciplining and undoing of Major Akerley and the recovery of the aËroplane.

Tom Akerley, known to old Gaspard as Tom Anderson, lived his new life from day to day and tried not to worry. His shoulder mended rapidly, and he worked about the farm with a will. He spent much of his time in Gaspard’s company, working in the crops, mending fences and clearing stones from the fields; and the fact that the old man’s rifle always lay or stood near at hand at once amused and irritated him.

Gaspard continued to cling to his belief that he had been visited by a devil, a fiend of darkness out of the night, and that the visitor was still somewhere in the vicinity; and sometimes Tom joined him on these fruitless hunts for the intruder through the surrounding forests. On these occasions, Tom was armed with a muzzle-loading, double-barrelled gun, the left barrel rammed with a bullet and the right with duck-shot.

“Would you know him if you saw him?” asked Tom during one of these expeditions, as they rested after a stumbling struggle through an alder swamp.

“He’d be discovered to me quick as the flash of an eye,” replied the old man. “Fer years have I bin expectin’ him, in punishment for the reckless ways o’ my youth; an’ I’ll know ’im when I set eyes on ’im, ye kin lay to that!”

“And then what will you do?” asked Tom.

“Pump it to ’im! Pump it into ’im!” exclaimed the old man, heartily; and he illustrated his pleasant intention by crooking and wiggling the trigger-finger of his right hand.

Even the knowledge of the fact that the cartridges in the rifle were harmless failed to put Tom entirely at his ease.

Tom enjoyed the evenings and rainy days. Then he read or played chess with Catherine or listened to Gaspard’s stories of the past. The old man told some stirring tales of his physical prowess; and always at the conclusion of such narratives he would say, in a fallen voice, “Vanity, vanity, all sich things is vanity.”

The grass ripened for the scythe; and Tom drew Gaspard’s attention to the fact.

“Mick would feel reel put out if we started hayin’ before he got here,” said Gaspard. “He ain’t missed a hayin’ in twenty year, Mick Otter ain’t.”

“Where does he live?” asked Tom.

“Everywheres,” replied the old man. “Mostly crost the height-o’-land, I reckon. He can’t keep still fer long, that Injun. Soon as the ice busts up he’s off, runnin’ the woods till the grass is ripe. He lights out agin after harvest, an’ lives on the gun till the snow lays a foot deep over these clearin’s. He’ll be here inside the week, to mow the first swath—onless somethin’s happened to ’im.”

They took down the scythes next morning, and Tom turned the grindstone while Gaspard ground the long blades. They were intent on their task in the sunshine when a shadow fell suddenly upon the stone. Tom glanced up and saw a squat figure standing within a few feet of him. He ceased to turn the stone and straightened his back. Old Gaspard poured water from a rusty tin along the edge of the blade, tested its keenness with a thumb and said, “How do, Mick.”

“How do,” replied the old Maliseet. “You start hayin’, what?”

“Reckoned ye’d be along in time to cut the first swath,” returned Gaspard.

Mick Otter nodded his head and looked at Tom. His eyes were round and dark and very bright. He stared unwinking for several seconds, then turned again to Gaspard.

“You got young man for Catherine, what?” he said.

Gaspard smiled.

“That’s as may be,” he replied. “Ask Catherine herself, if ye wanter know. Howsumever, this here’s Tom Anderson, from ’way over on the upper St. John. He speared a salmon an’ the wardens chased ’im out.”

“That so?” said Mick Otter. “Chase ’im quite a ways, what?”

Tom laughed goodnaturedly.

The three went into the house, where Catherine welcomed Mick Otter cordially and produced a second breakfast. The Maliseet ate swiftly, heartily and in silence, nodding or shaking his head now and then in answer to a question. Then the three men returned to the scythes and the grindstone. Fifteen minutes later they were mowing in the oldest and ripest meadow. Mick Otter led along the edge of the field; old Gaspard followed and Tom brought up the rear. Tom had learned to swing a scythe when a small boy. Like swimming and milking, it is a knack not easily forgotten. Catherine came out and sat on the fence. Mick Otter left his place and walked over to her, wiped his long blade with a handful of grass and then played on it with his ringing scythe-stone. Returning the stone to his hip-pocket, he said, “How that young feller come here, anyhow?”

“Why, how would he come?” returned the girl, “not in a canoe, that’s certain; and he didn’t bring a horse.”

“Maybe he walk here, hey?”

“That seems reasonable, Mick.”

“An’ maybe he don’t walk, what?”

Catherine glanced over to assure herself that her grandfather was out of ear-shot, then descended from her perch on the top rail and stepped close to the old Maliseet.

“What do you mean, Mick Otter?” she asked in a whisper.

“That young feller no guide nor lumberman,” said Mick. “Big man, him. See his picter in the paper, all dress up like soldier.”

While he spoke his round, bright eyes searched her eyes.

“Keep quiet,” she whispered. “Grandad doesn’t know—nobody knows. I’ll tell you first chance I get. You are my friend, Mick. You’ll keep quiet, won’t you? Grandad thinks it was a devil—and he is always hunting around with his rifle.”

“That a’ right,” said the Indian; and he returned to his work.

Catherine soon found an opportunity for speech with Akerley. She told him of her conversation with Mick Otter.

“I am not afraid of him,” she continued. “He is kind and sane: He will keep your secret, if we are perfectly frank with him. I am afraid of the newspapers. A mail comes in once a fortnight to Millbrow, and that is only ten miles below Boiling Pot; and perhaps Ned Tone has already seen a paper with your photograph and story in it.”

Tom’s face paled for an instant.

“Please don’t think that I am afraid of Ned Tone,” he said. “I am only afraid of being driven away from here. But perhaps there is no real danger of it. That fellow’s eyes may not be as sharp as Mick Otter’s. If the old Indian is to be trusted I’ll just carry on and let Ned Tone make the next move; but I think he would have been nosing around before this, if he had recognized my phiz in a newspaper.”

“But he does not know you are here,” said the girl. “He has every reason to believe that you are lost in the woods, wandering about eating wild berries—or dead.”

When old Mick Otter heard Tom Akerley’s story from Catherine, he permitted himself the faintest flicker of a smile. The thing that tickled his sense of humor was the position of his old friend Gaspard Javet.

“Gaspar’ he hate devil darn bad an’ like Tom darn well, what?” he remarked. “We bes’ fix them catridges again before Gaspar’ shoot at deer or bobcat, or maybe he smell somethin’, hey?”

“But what shall we do if Ned Tone sees a newspaper and suspects the truth about Tom?” asked Catherine.

“How you know that until he come, hey? He don’t git no newspaper, maybe, down to B’ilin’ Pot. We watch out sharp, anyhow; an’ if Ned Tone make the move, me an’ Tom take to the big woods; an’ nobody find ’im then, you bet. Ned Tone got nothin’ in his skull ’cept some muscle off his neck.”

With this the girl had to be satisfied, but she believed that both Tom and the old Maliseet under-rated Ned Tone’s cunning and the possible danger which he represented.

The weather held fine and the hay-making went briskly on day by day; and in odd half-hours, usually late at night, Mick and Tom worked at replacing the explosive charges in Gaspard’s cartridges. Catherine helped in this, by carrying and returning, as she had helped Tom in the work of withdrawing the same charges of cordite. She and Tom felt no fear now of the old man’s recognizing Tom as the being that had swooped down from the sky; and Tom felt so sure now of Gaspard’s friendship and sanity that, but for the girl, he would have confessed the facts of the case to him. She would not hear of this, however.

“You don’t know him as well as I do,” she argued. “He is a dear, kind old man—but he is quite mad on that one subject of a visit from a devil. But, of course, if you want to be shot dead, if you are tired of life in this dull place, tell Grandad.”

“Then I’ll not tell him—for I was never more interested in life than I am now,” said Tom, gravely.

Soon all the grass was cut, cured and housed, except that in the “new clearin’.” This piece of land was actually four, five and six years old as a clearing. Though not more than four acres in extent it represented three seasons’ brushing and burning. Old Gaspard Javet had cleared every rod of it single-handed. Each spring, as soon as the ground was dry, he had set to work, cutting out the brush and smaller growth at the roots but leaving waist-high stumps in the felling of the larger timber. Then, having trimmed and twitched out the stuff for fence-rails and firewood, he had piled the brush and branches and set fire to them, piled them again and burned them again, then scattered his oats and grass-seed and harrowed them into the ashes among the scorched stumps. Thus he had taken a crop of grain, or a crop of fodder if the frosts fell early, from each patch of new land in the first year, and harvests of hay in the following years. Now the whole clearing stood thick with long spears of timothy grass that topped the gray and black stumps.

The new clearing lay north of the older fields and was separated from them by a belt of woods several hundred yards wide.

Tom cut into the ripe timothy early one morning, while Gaspard Javet and Mick Otter were still engaged in an argument concerning the relative merits of several methods of trapping mink. He cut along the northern edge of the field—a wavering swath, owing to obtrusive stumps. He was about to return to the starting-point when the excited barking of Blackie, the little dog of obscure antecedents, attracted his attention. There was a serious, threatening note in Blackie’s outcry that was new to it—a tone that Tom had never heard when chipmunks, or even porcupines, were the cause of the excitement.

“He has found something interesting,” said Tom, and he immediately balanced the scythe on the top of a stump, vaulted the brush-fence and made for the sound through the thick undergrowth of young spruces. The dog continued to bark; and suddenly Tom realized that he was moving to the right in full cry. So he quickened his own pace and shouted to the dog as he ran. Then he heard the crashing of a heavy body through the thickets, receding swiftly; and Blackie’s angry yelps, also receding, took on a breathless note. He ran at top speed for several hundred yards, avoiding the trunks of trees but setting his feet down blindly, until a sprawled root tripped him and laid him flat on the moss. He sat up as soon as he had recovered his breath.

“It didn’t sound like a deer,” he reflected. “It wasn’t jumping. The pup doesn’t pay any attention to deer. It may have been a bear or a moose—though I can’t quite imagine either of them running away from that pup.”

He got to his feet and spent a few minutes in searching around for tracks in the moss. Though rain had fallen during the night, he failed to discover any marks of hoof or claw. So he returned to the clearing; and there he found Gaspard and Mick.

“What you bin chasin’, hey?” asked the Maliseet.

Tom told them. Mick immediately discarded his scythe and scrambled through the fence. Old Gaspard Javet grinned and stroked his white whiskers.

“There goes that durned Injun, fer a run in the woods,” he said, with an expression of face and voice as if he were speaking of a beloved infant. “He’s the everlastin’est wild-goose chaser I ever see. He’d foller a shadder, Mick would—aye, foller its tracks, an’ overhaul it, too—an’ maybe try to skin it. But he’s more for the chase nor the kill, Mick is—more for the hunt nor the skin. He’s what Cathie’s pa uster call a good sportsman, I reckon—that gad-about old Injun.”

Then he swung his scythe with a dry swish through the stems of tall timothy and a thousand purple-powdered heads bowed down before him.

Gaspard and Tom moved steadily among the stumps for about half an hour; and then Mick Otter scrambled back through the fence with the little dog panting at his heels.

“That b’ar got boots on, anyhow,” said Mick.

“Boots, d’ye say?” exclaimed Gaspard. “Boots!—an’ spyin’ ’round like a wild critter instead of walkin’ up to the house an’ namin’ his business like a Christian. I reckon I best take a look at him an’ his boots.”

He laid aside the scythe and took up his ever-handy rifle.

“You think him devil, what?” said Mick.

“Ye can’t never tell,” returned Gaspard, climbing the barrier of brush that shut the forest from the clearing.

Mick Otter and the little dog followed. Tom checked his own impulse to go rambling in the cool woods, filled and lit his pipe and returned to the mowing. He had not gone half the length of the field before Catherine came running to him, straight through the standing crop.

“Ned Tone is at the house,” she said, breathlessly; and then, “Where are the others?” she asked.

Tom told her of the morning’s excitement.

“That was Ned Tone,” she said. “He had been running, I know. You didn’t see him; and I am sure he didn’t see you, by the questions he asked. But he wouldn’t have come spying like that if he didn’t think there was a chance of your being here.”

“Do you suppose he has seen a paper and suspects something?” asked Tom.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see anything in his manner to suggest it. He was just as he always is—except that he asked if I had seen anything of a stranger recently.”

“Where is he now?”

“Sitting on the porch. I told him to wait there—that I would soon be back.”

“And he didn’t wait!” exclaimed Tom. “He came sneaking after you.”

He stepped past the girl and ran forward through the tall grass.

“I see you,” he shouted as he ran. “What are you prying ’round here for? Stand up and show yourself.”

Ned Tone advanced reluctantly from the belt of forest that separated the old clearings from the new, with an air of embarrassment and anger. Tom walked aggressively up to him, halting within a yard of him. They were in plain sight of Catherine.

“So it’s you!” exclaimed Tom. “Were you looking for me?”

“Nope, I wasn’t,” said Tone. “Who be ye, anyhow?”

“I’m the man who didn’t take the track to the left, as you know very well,” replied Tom, smiling dangerously. “Your face looks better than it did when I last saw you. Your lip has healed quite nicely.”

“’S that so! Mind yer own business, will ye? Have I got to ask yer leave to come to Gaspard Javet’s clearin’s?”

“Certainly not—but I thought you didn’t know the way. You told me that Gaspard’s place lay to the west. What were you spying ’round here for, half an hour ago?”

Tom jerked a thumb toward the northern edge of the field.

“What of it?” retorted the other. “I go where I choose. I was here afore ye ever come an’ I’ll be here still, after ye’re gone. I don’t step outer my tracks fer every tramp an’ thief that runs the woods. Don’t think ye own this country jist because the game-wardens chased ye away from where ye belong.”

“What do you know about the game-wardens?” asked Tom, in surprise, wondering where the fellow had heard the yarn which he had been forced to tell to old Gaspard Javet.

“I ain’t a fool,” returned Ned Tone, with a knowing leer. “What else would ye’ve come into this country for? But if ye don’t clear out, I’ll put old Gaspard wise to ye; an’ he’ll run ye outer these woods.”

Tom laughed cheerfully; and Catherine heard it and caught the note of relief in it.

“Gaspard is hunting you with his rifle this very minute,” he said. “He and Mick Otter are on your tracks.”

“Huntin’ me!” exclaimed Tone. “Me an’ this family is old friends.”

Catherine MacKim joined them at that moment.

“You are not a friend of ours, Ned Tone,” she said, looking him straight in the eyes. “Grandad and I don’t have cowards and liars for friends.”