“They call it!” repeated the old sailor. “Who calls it? If you mean the Blair place, that’s Hogg’s Haven, that is! You can’t wipe out that name while there’s a man living as knew the place at its worst. Old Captain Hogg built it and lived in it and died in it. And if there’s a fryin’-pan in hell, the devil is fryin’ bacon out of old Hogg to-day for the things he done in that house.” “How long since did he die?” “Oh, twenty year back.” “And the house was sold soon after?” “Stood vacant for ten years. Then this rich feller, Blair, bought it. I don’t know him; but he bought a weevilly biscuit, there. A bad house, it is—rotten bad!” “What’s wrong with it?” “Men’s bones in the brick and women’s blood in the mortar.” “Was the old boy a cannibal?” asked Kent, amused by the sea veteran’s heroics. “Just as bad: slave-trader.” “Have you ever been in the house?” “Many’s the time, when it was Hogg’s Haven. Only once, since. They do tell that the curse has come down with the house and is heavy on the new owner’s son.” “So I’ve heard.” The old white head wagged bodingly. “The curse of the blood,” he said. “It’s on all that race.” “But that wouldn’t affect the Blairs.” “Not Aleck Blair. But the boy.” “How so?” “Didn’t you know there was the same strain in young Wilfrid Blair, as there was in old Captain Hogg?” “Hogg’s oldest sister was the grandmother of this young feller’s mother, wasn’t she?” put in Elder Dennett. “That’s right. Wilfrid Blair’s great grandmother.” “And a bad ’un, too, I guess,” continued the Elder relishingly. “Don’t you say it!” cried the old seaman. “The curse of the blood was on her. Strange she was, and beautiful, so my mother used to tell me; but not bad. She came in at Lonesome Cove, too.” “Drowned at sea?” asked Kent. “They never knew. One day she was gone; the next night her body came in. They said in the countryside that she had the gift of second sight, and foretold her own death.” “Hum-m,” mused Kent. “And now the Blairs have changed the name of the place. No wonder.” “There’s one thing they haven’t changed, the private buryin’-plot.” “Family?” “Hogg’s there, all right, an’ never a parson in the countryside dared to speak to God about his soul, when they laid him there. His nephew, too, that was as black-hearted as himself. But the rest of the graves has got no headstones.” “Slaves?” “Them as he kept for his own service an’ killed in his tantrums. Nobody knows how many. You can see the bend of the creek where they lie, from the road, and the old willows that lean over ’em.” “Cheerful sort of person the late Mr. Hogg seems to have been. Any relics of his trade in the house?” “Relics? You may say so! His old pistols, and compasses, guns, nautical instruments, and the leaded whalebone whip that they used to say he slept with. They’ve got ’em hung on the walls now for ornyments. Ornyments! If they’d seen ’em as I’ve seen ’em, they’d sink the dummed things in a hundred fathom o’ clean sea.”