g to and fro where she had left it tied to a tree trunk. With the
vague terror still haunting her, she hastened to the skiff, pushed off,
and paddled swiftly away. But during the long voyage homeward the fear
did not entirely die away. "I am growing foolishly nervous," she said to
herself, with a weary sigh.

Miss Lois had discovered no left-handed men at the fair; but she had
seen a person whom she considered suspicious--a person who sold
medicines. "He was middle-sized," she said to Anne, in the low tone they
used when within the house, "and he had a down look--a thing I never
could abide. He spoke, too, in an odd voice. I suspected him as soon as
I laid my eyes upon him, and so just took up a station near him, and
watched. He wasn't left-handed _exactly_," she added, as though
he might have been so endowed inexactly; "but he is capable of
anything--left-handed, web-footed, or whatever you please. After taking
a good long look at him, I went round and made (of course by chance, and
accidentally) some inquiries. Nobody seemed to know much about him
except that his name is Juder (and highly appropriate in my opinion),
and he came to the fair the day before with his little hand-cart of
medicines, and _went out again_, into the country somewhere, at sunset.
Do you mark the significance of that, Ruth Young? He did not stay at the
Timloe hotel (prices reduced for the fair, and very reasonable beds on
the floor), like the other traders; but though the fair is to be
continued over to-morrow, and he is to be there, he took all the trouble
to go out of town for the night."

"Perhaps he had no money," said Anne, abstractedly.

"I saw him with my own eyes take in dollars and dollars. Singular that
when country people will buy nothing else, they will buy patent
medicines. No: the man knows something of that murder, and _could_ not
stay at that hotel, Ruth Young. And that's _my_ theory."

In her turn Anne now related the history of the day, and the discovery
of the solitary cabin. Miss Lois was not much impressed by the cabin. "A
man is better than a house, any day," she said. "But the thing is to get
the man to say 'cold.' I shall ask him to-morrow if he has any pills for
a cold in the head or on the lungs; and, as he tells long stories about
the remarkable cures his different bottles have effected, I hope, when I
once get him started, to hear the word several times. I confess, Ruth,
that I have great hopes; I feel the spirit r