"I suppose he's a native in these parts?" I ventured.
"No; but he's been here a good while. I guess nobody knows where he comes from--or cares. He works pretty hard, but I guess he likes it."
"Oh, he's a steady worker; but he's a queer kind, too. Now he never votes and he never goes to church; and for the sake of the argument, neither do I,"--and the old fellow winked prodigiously. "He's a mighty odd man; but I can't say that that's against him. But he's quiet and peaceable, and now his daughter--"
"Yes; and that's all he has, too; and they never have any visitors. The daughter just come home the other day, and we ain't hardly seen her yet. She's been away at school."
"I suppose Mr. Hartridge is absent sometimes; he doesn't live down there all the time, does he?"
"I can't say that I could prove it; sometimes I don't see him for a month or more; but his business is his own, stranger," he concluded pointedly.
"You think that if Mr. Hartridge had a visitor you'd know it?" I persisted, though the shopkeeper grew less amiable.
"Well, now I might; and again I mightn't. Mr. Hartridge is a queer man. I don't see him every day, and particularly in the winter I don't keep track of him."
With a little leading the storekeeper described Hartridge for me, and his description tallied exactly with the man who had caught me on the canoe-maker's premises the night before. And yet, when I had thanked the storekeeper and ridden on through the village, I was as much befuddled as ever. There was something decidedly incongruous in the idea that a man who was, by all superficial signs, at least, a gentleman, should be established in the business of making canoes by the side of a lonely creek in this odd corner of the world. From the storekeeper's account, Hartridge might be absent from his retreat for long periods; if he were Henry Holbrook and wished to annoy his sister, it was not so far from this lonely creek to the Connecticut town where Miss Pat lived. Again, as to the daughter, just home from school and not yet familiar to the eyes of the village, she might easily enough be an invention to hide the visits of Helen Holbrook. I found myself trying to account for the fact that, by some means short of the miraculous, Helen Holbrook had played chess with Miss Pat at St. Agatha's at the very hour I had seen her with her father on the Tippecanoe. And then I was baffled again as I remembered that Paul Stoddard had sent the two women to St. Agatha's, and that their destination could not have been chosen by Helen Holbrook.