cabin.  An involuntary exclamation of satisfaction escaped him and he drew back deeper among the trees.  It was the councilor who had shown himself.  For a few moments the old man stood gazing in the direction of St. James as if watching for the approach of other persons.  Then he dodged cautiously along the edge of the bushes, keeping half within their cover, and moved swiftly in the opposite direction toward the center of the island.  Nathaniel’s blood leaped with a desire to follow.  The night before he had guessed that Obadiah with his gold and his smoldering passion was not a man to isolate himself in the heart of the forest.  Here—­across the open—­was evidence of another side of his life.  In that great square-built domicile of logs, screened so perfectly by flowering lilac, lived Obadiah’s wives.  Captain Plum laughed aloud and beat the bowl of his pipe on the tree beside him.  And the girl lived there—­or came from there to the woodland cabin so frequently that her feet had beaten a well-worn path.  Had the councilor lied to him?  Was the girl he had seen through the King’s window one of the seven wives of Strang—­or was she the wife of Obadiah Price?

The thought was one that thrilled him.  If the girl was the councilor’s wife what was the motive of Obadiah’s falsehood?  And if she was Strang’s wife why had her feet—­and hers alone with the exception of the old man’s—­worn this path from the lilac smothered house to the cabin in the woods?  The captain of the Typhoon regretted now that he had given such explicit orders to Casey.  Otherwise he would have followed the figure that was already disappearing into the forest on the opposite side of the clearing.  But now he must see Strang.  There might be delay, necessary delay, and if it so happened that his own blundering curiosity kept him on the island until sundown—­well, he smiled as he thought of what Casey would do.

Refilling his pipe and leaving a trail of smoke behind him he set out boldly for St. James.  When he came to the three graves he stopped, remembering that Obadiah had said they were his graves.  A sort of grim horror began to stir at his soul as he gazed on the grass-grown mounds—­proofs that the old councilor would inherit a place in the Mormon Heaven having obeyed the injunctions of his prophet on earth.  Nathaniel now understood the meaning of his words of the night before.  This was the family burying ground of the old councilor.

He walked on, trying in vain to concentrate his mind solely upon the business that was ahead of him.  A few days before he would have counted this walk to St. James one of the events of his life.  Now it had lost its fascination.  Despite his efforts to destroy the vision of the beautiful face that had looked at him through the king’s window its memory still haunted him.  The eyes, soft with appeal; the red mouth, quivering, and with lips parted as if about to speak to him; the bowed head with its tumbled glory of hair—­all had burned themselves upon his soul in a picture too deep to be eradicated.  If St. James was interesting now it was because that face was a part of it, because the secret of its life, of the misery that it had confessed to him, was hidden somewhere down there among its scattered log homes.