99

VII THE PORTRAIT OF CICELY 113

VIII THE FIDDLER OF APPLE TREE LANE 127

IX THE FIDDLER OF APPLE TREE LANE (Continued) 145

X A MAN OF STRAW 159

XI THREE COUSINS 173

XII MEDFORD RIVER 195

THE WINDY HILL

CHAPTER I

THE BEEMAN

The road was a sunny, dusty one, leading upward through Medford
Valley, with half-wooded hills on each side whose far outline quivered
in the hot, breathless air of mid-June afternoon. Oliver Peyton seemed
to have no regard for heat or dust, however, but trudged along with
such a determined stride that people passing turned to look after him,
and more than one swift motor car curved aside to give him room.

"Want a ride?" inquired one genial farmer, drawing up beside him.
"Where are you going?"

Oliver turned to answer the first question, meaning to reply with a
relieved "yes," but his square, sunburned face hardened at the second.

"Oh, I am just going down the road--a little way," he replied stiffly,
shook his head at the repeated offer of a lift, and tramped on in the
dust.

The next man he met seemed also to feel a curiosity as to his errand,
for he stopped a very old, shambling horse to lean from his seat and
ask point-blank: "Where may you be going in such a hurry on such a
hot day?"

Oliver, looking up at the person who addressed him and gauging his
close-set, hard gray eyes and his narrow, dark face, conceived an
instant dislike and distrust of the stranger. He replied shortly, as
he had before, but with less good temper:

"I am going down the road a little way. And, as you say, I am rather
in a hurry."

"Oh, are you indeed?" returned the man, measuring the boy up and down
with a disagreeable, inquisitive glance. "In too much of a hurry to
have your manners with you, even!" He shot him a look of keen and
hostile penetration. "It almost looks as though you were running away
from something."

He stopped for no further comment but went jingling off in his
rattletrap cart, the cloud of dust raised by his old horse's clumsy
feet hanging long in the air behind him. Oliver plodded forward,
muttering dark threats against the disagreeable stranger, and wishing
that he had been sufficiently quick of speech to contradict him.

Yet the ran