“Can I?” laughed Miles Burton. “Yes, I can, but that’s all the good it’s likely to do. He’ll have her so changed over, if he gets a day to himself down among those islands, that the man who built her wouldn’t recognize her. It won’t be the first time he has done it. He carries a full equipment aboard, a different set of sails, different fitting spars, different gear of all kinds, and paint to change her colour. Once let him get in near a sheer bluff, where he can lay alongside, with some trees growing close to the water’s edge, so he can rig a tackle and heel her way over, and he will have a yacht of a different colour before she’s many hours older. He did the thing up in Long Island Sound for several years, and changed her name a half a dozen times into the bargain. He’s done some smuggling up along the Canadian border, too, I’m told, and there isn’t a better nor a more daring seaman anywhere in this world. However, we’ll do the best we can. Lend a hand, now, all of you; we’ve got to get that wounded man down over the bluff, or down through the woods, and row him across the cove, where we can get a doctor to dress that wound of his. He’s not dangerously hurt, I believe, but he’s faint and sick, and we must work spry.” A half-hour later, at the wharf across the cove, before the eyes of an excited crowd, composed of villagers, cottagers, and hotel guests, who had gathered hurriedly at the sound of the firing, there was landed a strange boat-load,—the strangest that had ever come ashore at the harbour. Imagine the amazement of Colonel Witham upon beholding his favourite guest, Mr. Kemble, bundled unceremoniously out of the rowboat, with manacles upon his wrists. Imagine the concern of the villagers when the man French, his wound clumsily swathed in bandages and his face pale and distressed, was lifted ashore and carried bodily up the slip to the nearest shelter. Nothing like it had ever happened before, not in all the island’s history. “And you say you knew that man was a burglar for two or three days, and let him stay in the house and didn’t tell us?” demanded Mrs. Carlin, wrathfully, of Henry Burns. “Yes’m,” said Henry Burns. “Well, if you’re not the worst boy I ever had the care of. Here we might all have been murdered and robbed, and you’d be as guilty as he. And to think I sat and talked with him there, and shook hands with him when he went away. Henry Burns, you’ll go to bed an hour earlier for a week for this. And you deserve worse punishment than that.” Henry Burns assumed his most penitent expression. CHAPTER XI. AN UNPLEASANT DISCOVERY