At the coming of Jerry's car a man who had been kneeling over some fishing-lines at the river's edge rose up beside the road, brushing the wet sand from his clothes, and staring at her. He was small and old and stooped and fuzzy, and thoroughly unpretty to see. "It's the Teddy Bear who 'sat in the sand and the sun' coming up from that horrid railroad junction. Who's afraid of bears? I'll ask him how to find my lost empire." Jerry did not reflect that it was the unconscious effect of this humble creature's thoughtfulness for her that made her unafraid of him in this lonely spot. Reflection was not yet one of her active psychological processes. "I want to find a ranch-house by a big bend in the river where it turns east," Jerry said, looking at the man much as she would look at the bend in the river--merely for the information to be furnished. He pushed his brown cap back from his forehead and rubbed his fingers thoughtfully through his thin sunburnt hair. "It's Joe's place, eh?" the high, quavering voice squeaking like an unused machine afraid of itself. "You'd ought to took the t'other fork of the road back yander. It's a goodish mile on down this way now to where you das to turn your cyar round. When you get where you kin turn, then go back and take the t'other fork. It'll take you right to Joe's door about." The words came hesitatingly, as if the speaker had little use for sounding them in his solitary, silent life. Fishermen don't catch fish by talking to them. "A mile! I think I'll turn right here," Jerry declared. Then, as the meek unknown watched her in open-mouthed wonder, she swung her car deftly about, the outer wheels barely keeping a toe-hold on the edge of the river-bank, with hardly more than an inch of space between them and the crumbling sand above the water. As she faced the way over which she had come she reached out to drop a piece of silver into the man's hand. He let it fall to the ground, then picked it up and laid it on the top of the car door. "I ain't workin' for the gov'mint," he quavered. "I thankee, but I don't have no knowin's to sell. Ye're welcome to my ketch of information any day ye're on the river." He made an odd half-military salute toward his old yellow-brown cap and shuffled across the road toward a narrow path running back through the bushes. At the bend in the river Jerry found herself. "That must be the ranch-house that Mr. Ponk gave me for a landmark, for there goes the river bending east, all right. What a quaint, picturesque thing that is, and built of stone, too, with ivy all over it! It must have been here a long time. And how well kept everything is! The old Teddy Bear said it was 'Joe's place.' Well, Joe keeps it looking as different from some of the places I've passed as 'Eden' differs from other country-places back in Pennsylvania." The long, low, stone ranch-house, nestling under its sheltering vines, had an old and familiarly homey look to Jerry.