oset Bay once, and you brought me bad luck. You get out. I
don't want you around here. Get out, I say."

He moved threateningly toward Henry Burns, and the boy, seeing it was
useless to try to remain, stepped outside.

"No, I don't want you, either," said Colonel Witham, turning abruptly
now to John Ellison. "No boys around this mill. I don't care if your
father did own it. You can't work here. I've no place for you."

Despite his blustering and almost threatening manner, however, Colonel
Witham did not offer to thrust John Ellison from the mill. He seemed on
the point of doing it, but something stopped him. He couldn't have told
what. But he merely repeated his refusal, and turned away.

It was only boyish impulse on John Ellison's part, and an innocent
purchaser of the mill would have laughed at him; but he stepped nearer
to Colonel Witham and said, earnestly, "You'll have to let me in here
some day, Colonel Witham. The mill isn't yours, and you know it." And he
added, quickly, as the thought occurred to him, "Perhaps the
fortune-teller you saw at the circus will tell me more than she told
you. Perhaps she'll tell me where the papers are."

For a moment Colonel Witham's heavy face turned deathly pale, and he
leaned for support against one of the beams of the mill. Then the colour
came back into his face with a rush, and he stamped angrily on the
floor.

"Confound you!" he cried. "You clear out, too. I don't know anything
about your fortune-tellers, and I don't care. I've got no time to fool
away with boys. Now get out."

John Ellison walked slowly to the door, leaving the colonel mopping his
face and turning alternately white and red; and as he stepped outside
Colonel Witham dropped into a chair.

Then, as the boys went on together up the hill to the Ellison farm,
Colonel Witham, recovering in a measure from the shock he had received,
arose from his chair, somewhat unsteady on his legs, and began, for the
hundredth and more time, a weary, fruitless search of the old mill, from
the garret to the very surface of the water flowing under it.

And as Colonel Witham groped here and there, in dusty corners, he
muttered, "What on earth did he mean? The fortune-teller--how could he
know of that? There's witchcraft at work somewhere. But there aren't any
papers in this mill. I know it. I know it. I know it."

And still he kept up his search until it was long past the time for
shutting down.

Three days after this,