ter all?" he
suggested. "It usually doesn't take me so long."

"No," decided Cai somewhat hurriedly; "it might remind--I mean, there
isn't the same kind of hurry with a musical box."

"It would be much the better for a bath of paraffin," muttered John
Peter, prying into the works. But Cai continued to stare at the plate
on the wall, and was staring at it when a voice at the door called
"Good mornin'!" and Mr Philp entered.

"Ho!" said Mr Philp, "I didn' know as you two were acquainted.
And what might _you_ be doin' here, cap'n?"

"A triflin' matter of business, that's all," answered Cai, who chafed
under Mr Philp's inquisitiveness; but chafed, like everybody else, in
vain.

"Orderin' your breastplate? . . . It's well to be in good time when
you're dealin' with John Peter," said Mr Philp with dreadful jocularity.
"As I came along the head o' the town," he explained, "I heard that
Snell's wife had passed away in the night. A happy release. I dropped
in to see if they'd given you the job."

John Peter shook his head.

"And I don't suppose you'll get it, neither," said Mr Philp; "but I
wanted to make sure. Push,--that's what you want. That's the only
thing nowadays. Push. . . . You're lookin' at John Peter's misfits, I
see," he went on, turning to Cai. "Now, _there's_ a man whose place, as
you might say, won't go unfilled much longer--hey?" Mr Philp pointed
his walking-stick at the name of the late owner of Rilla, and achieved a
sort of watery wink.

"I daresay you mean something by that, Mr Philp," said Cai, staring at
him, half angry and completely puzzled. "But be dashed if I know what
you _do_ mean."

"There now! And I reck'ned as you an' Cap'n Hunken had ne'er a secret
you didn't share!"

'"Bias?" asked Cai slowly. "Who was talkin' of 'Bias?"

"It takes 'em that way sometimes," said Mr Philp, wiping a rheumy eye.
"An' the longer they puts it off the more you can't never tell which way
it will take 'em. O' course, if Cap'n Hunken didn't tell you he'd been
visitin' Rilla lately, he must have had his reasons, an' I'm sorry I
spoke."

Cai was breathing hard. "Bias? . . . When?"

"The last time I spied him was two days ago . . . in the late afternoon.
Now you come to mention it, I'd a notion at the time he wasn't anxious
to be seen. For he came over the fields at the back--across the
ten-acre field that Mrs Bosenna carried last week--and a very tidy crop,
I'm told, though but moderate long in