Page:Moving Picture Boys on the Coast.djvu/78

68 began to be circulated. Government inspectors began to call more often than they used to, inspecting my light—my light, that I've tended nigh onto twenty-five years now. I began to hear rumors that my assistant wasn't altogether straight. He was said to be seen consorting with the wreckers, though it was hard to get proof that the men were wreckers, for they pretended to be fishermen.

"Then come a day when, with my own eyes, I saw Nate Duncan walking along the beach with one of the men who was said to be at the head of the wrecking gang. I could see that they were quarreling, and then Nate knocked the man down. He didn't get up right away, for, as I said, Nate was strong. I knew something would come of that, and I wasn't much surprised when that day Nate disappeared."

"Disappeared?" cried Blake.

"Went off completely, and left me alone at the light. I tended it all night, same as I had done before, many a time, and the next day I reported matters, and I had a new assistant—the same one I have now."

"But that doesn't prove anything," said Blake. "Just because Joe's father, and a man suspected of being a wrecker, had a quarrel, doesn't say that Mr. Duncan was a wrecker, too."