The first meeting with his three friends after his return was not very satisfactory. They chided him for his absence, derided him for going to Canada at all at the instigation of a sharp child, and charged him with trying to serve his own ends by the delay. They even went so far as to suggest that perhaps he was in with Darcy himself and this was all a big bluff. Tyke drew off and fairly bellowed at them in his wrath, and finally settled down to a plan which he said would bring things to a climax within a week. The four heads were bent together long over a paper on which Cottar was jotting down suggestions for Tyke to act upon. It was Tyke, after all, who was made to play the part out in the open. And once, while they were talking in a little shanty far away from the town, with a bit of a candle in an old lantern for light, and their paper spread out on a rough box, there came a face at the window, a long, white, thin old face with only two teeth, one above and one below; a long heavy wisp of snow-white hair straggling over a high yellow forehead, and watery, faded eyes, yet keen, watching them. It ducked down when Tyke lifted his head once and looked nervously that way as a twig rubbed up and down on the roof in the wind from the old apple-tree outside, but the eyes peered up again and watched long and silently, listening; and crouched when the men put out the lantern and stole away into the night. It was only old Noah Casey, harmless and wandering about again, escaped from the poor farm, and travelling some of the old roads of his youth. Nobody minded old Noah, though he gave them a start now and then. He was following a voice now, the voice he had heard loudest inside the shanty, the voice of the one with the red hair. Crouching low, he stole from tuft to tuft of the marshy grass, a thing of the night, old, flighty, his worn garment colorless like weathered wood, his wisps of hair blowing like gray clouds about his mild, anxious face from under the tattered felt hat. A bent old gnome in the dark, with something on his mind. CHAPTER XXVI Along in the early spring one night just as Eugene and Nan were about to retire, the telephone bell rang and a man’s voice asked if Mr. Massey was at home, and if he could see some one on important business connected with his cousin Miss Radway. Eugene was immediately excited, and fairly shouted into the telephone, demanding to know who was speaking. “That’s all right, pard. I ain’t tellin’ all I know over the wire. Alone now? I’ll drop around. This is absolutely Q. T. you know.” Nan stood trembling in the doorway, white-faced, frightened. “You go to bed!” ordered Eugene, trying to still the excitement of his own voice, and getting up to pace the room nervously. “Go to bed, I say!” he roared as Nan still stood in the doorway watching him.