“Now, if you please, I’d like to know what you mean by prowling about here and rummaging my house!”

“Oh, it’s you, is it, Mr. Glenarm? Well, you certainly gave me a bad scare.”

His air was one of relief and his teeth showed pleasantly through his beard.

“It certainly is I. But you haven’t answered my question. What were you doing in my house to-day?”

He smiled again, shaking his head.

“You’re really fooling, Mr. Glenarm. I wasn’t in your house to-day; I never was in it in my life!”

His white teeth gleamed in his light beard; his hat was pushed back from his forehead so that I saw his eyes, and he wore unmistakably the air of a man whose conscience is perfectly clear. I was confident that he lied, but without appealing to Bates I was not prepared to prove it.

“But you can’t deny that you’re on my grounds now, can you?” I had dropped the revolver to my knee, but I raised it again.

“Certainly not, Mr. Glenarm. If you’ll allow me to explain—”

“That’s precisely what I want you to do.”

“Well, it may seem strange,”—he laughed, and I felt the least bit foolish to be pointing a pistol at the head of a fellow of so amiable a spirit.

“Hurry,” I commanded.

“Well, as I was saying, it may seem strange; but I was just examining the wall to determine the character of the work. One of the cottagers on the lake left me with the job of building a fence on his place, and I’ve been expecting to come over to look at this all fall. You see, Mr. Glenarm, your honored grandfather was a master in such matters, as you may know, and I didn’t see any harm in getting the benefit—to put it so—of his experience.”

I laughed. He had denied having entered the house with so much assurance that I had been prepared for some really plausible explanation of his interest in the wall.

“Morgan—you said it was Morgan, didn’t you?—you are undoubtedly a scoundrel of the first water. I make the remark with pleasure.”

“Men have been killed for saying less,” he said.

“And for doing less than firing through windows at a man’s head. It wasn’t friendly of you.”

“I don’t see why you center all your suspicions on me. You exaggerate my importance, Mr. Glenarm. I’m only the man-of-all-work at a summer resort.”

“I wouldn’t believe you, Morgan, if you swore on a stack of Bibles as high as this wall.”

“Thanks!” he ejaculated mockingly.