ell me again that you're taking a little before breakfast stroll to
Portsmouth to work up an appetite. In the first place, have you seen a
man about your size along the road anywhere?"

"Not a soul!" declared Archie solemnly.

"Mighty queer Hoky doesn't turn up! I warned the beggar against these
seaside villas; they're all outfitted with fancy burglar alarms that
make a deuce of a row when you step on the wire. Electricity is the bane
of the craft; you light a wire that rings a gong loud enough to wake the
dead and then some chap jumps out of bed and turns on all the lights in
the house and very likely opens up with a gun before you can say
Jerusalem. But Hoky thought he knew better."

Archie clutched at the stone fence against which his captor had pushed
him and his breath came in long gasps.

"You mean," he faltered, "that you fear your friend has been shot!"

"That, my dear sir, is exactly what troubles me! Hoky didn't need to do
it; that's what rouses my indignation! He's been running free for two
years, and not a thing against him--wiped out all his indictments with
good time like an honest thief, and now very likely he's been potted by
some large prosperous householder as he was trying to lift a bit of
silver; and these country houses never have anything worth risking your
life for! My dear boy, can you blame me for being peeved, enormously
peeved, when I reflect that Hoky, one of the best pals in the world, is
probably lying as dead as a pickled mackerel somewhere back yonder? Or
if he has escaped death in his felonious enterprise he may have met the
constable and be awaiting the pleasure of a grand jury of righteous
farmers of the old commonwealth of Maine!"

Archie's tongue clung to the roof of his mouth as he tried to murmur
his sympathy for the stranger's sorrow. The thought that he was probably
talking to the accomplice of the man he had shot was terrifying; the
stranger seemed enormously fond of Hoky and if he knew that he had
within his grasp the person who was responsible for Hoky's failure to
return from his visit to Bailey Harbor he would very likely make haste
to avenge his friend's death. It seemed to Archie that the gods were
playing strange tricks upon him indeed. The man's speech was not the
argot he had assumed from his reading of crook stories to be the common
utterance of the underworld. There was something attractive in the
fellow. He carried himself jauntily, and his clean-shaven, rounded