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 runabout and turned to go. The boy was standing motionless with his arm slightly crooked just as the blanket had been taken from it; but when Carron turned, he slipped rapidly ahead of him and disappeared in the darkness of the old stable. A flight of ghostly little echoes announced his passing through. Carron waited several moments before he could overcome his instinct to go out by another way.

"Queer business," he thought, as he walked back along the wagon track. "More deaf in his mind than in his ears, I should say. I wonder if he understood me! Ugh!" Moral obliquity he could meet with untroubled nerves, but deformity in body or brains disturbed his very flesh. He glimpsed the white, turbaned head of the proprietress peering for him from the porch, and that brought back his more important perplexity. "How in the deuce am I to get at this Rader?" he pondered. "I shall have to persuade that good soul to keep me another night.". Lacking a hat, he raised his hand in salute as she caught sight of him.

"Your room is ready," she said. "I have had to put you in the old wing where we live in the winters. I hope you don't mind."

"I shall like it above all things—better, I am sure, than the new part," Carron declared, and was di-