se. Aunt Agatha,
bristling, sat up.

"Don't you dare speak to me like that after breathing vulgar liquor
fumes all over my niece's house and tying up that nice foreign
gentleman," she quavered weakly. "Don't you dare! I live in this
house, young man, and Carl will see to it that I'm protected. He
always has. He's very good to me."

Hunch glowered sullenly at her, fearful, in the face of her
relationship to Carl, of committing still another unforgivable offense.

"I once knew a stout young man with a glass eye," she gulped with
increasing courage, "and he was hanged by the neck until he was
dead--quite dead--and then they cut his body down and his relatives
took it away in a cart and on the way home it came to life--"

Aunt Agatha halted abruptly, vaguely conscious that this somewhat
felicitous ending to the tragedy, as an object lesson to Hunch, left
much to be desired.

"Leave the house!" she commanded with shrill magnificence, for all her
hair and dress were awry, and her round face flushed. "Leave the
house."

Hunch shrugged and obeyed. It was nearly noon and there was no single
east-side acquaintance--no, not even Link Murphy, the terrible--whom he
feared as he feared Carl Granberry.

Weeping, Aunt Agatha watched him go.

CHAPTER XVI

THE YOUNG MAN OF THE SEA

Diane was to learn that the infernal persistence of the Old Man of the
Sea of Arabian origin could find its match in youth. A week slipped
by. Philip wove an unsatisfactory mat of sedge upon a loom of cord and
stakes, whittled himself a knife and fork and spoon which he initialed
gorgeously with the dye of a boiled alder, invented a camp rake of
forked branches, made a broom of twigs, and sunk a candle in the floor
of his tent which he covered with a bottomless milk bottle. All in
all, he told Nero, he was evoluting rapidly into an excellent woodsman,
despite the peculiar appearance of the sedge mat.

When Diane was honestly indignant, Philip was quiet and industrious,
and accomplished a great deal with his knife and bits of wood. When,
finding his cheerful good humor irresistible, she was forced to fly the
flag of truce, he was profoundly grateful.

"When do you think you'll go?" demanded Diane pointedly one morning as
she deftly swung her line into the river. "Unless you contrive to get
stabbed again," she added doubtfully, "I really don't see what's
keeping you."

"When I may help you break camp and escort you back to you