“No.  He lives alone.  I don’t like him.  I wish he would move away.  He doesn’t do the park any good.”

A man was sitting on the porch of the Tighe place as they drove up.  Beside him lay a pair of crutches.

“That is Jess,” the girl told Beaudry.  “Don’t mind if he is gruff or bad-tempered.  He is soured.”

But evidently this was not the morning for Tighe to be gruff.  He came to meet them on his crutches, a smile on his yellow, sapless face.  That smile seemed to Roy more deadly than anger.  It did not warm the cold, malignant eyes nor light the mordant face with pleasure.  Only the lips and mouth responded mechanically to it.

“Glad to see you, Miss Beulah.  Come in.”

He opened the gate and they entered.  Presently Beaudry, his blood beating fast, found himself shaking hands with Tighe.  The man had an odd trick of looking at one always from partly hooded eyes and at an angle.

“Mr. Street is selling windmills,” explained Miss Rutherford.  “Brad Charlton said you were talking of buying one, so here is your chance.”

“Yes, I been thinking of it.”  Tighe’s voice was suave.  “What is your proposition, Mr. Street?”

Roy talked the Dynamo Aermotor for fifteen minutes.  There was something about the still look of this man that put him into a cold sweat.

It was all he could do to concentrate his attention on the patter of a salesman, but he would not let his mind wander from the single track upon which he was projecting it.  He knew he was being watched closely.  To make a mistake might be fatal.

“Sounds good.  I’ll look your literature over, Mr. Street.  I suppose you’ll be in the park a few days?”

“Yes.”

“Then you can come and see me again.  I can’t come to you so easy, Mr.—­er—­”

“Street,” suggested Beulah.

“That’s right—­Street.  Well, you see I’m kinder tied down.”  He indicated his crutches with a little lift of one hand.  “Maybe Miss Beulah will bring you again.”

“Suits me fine if she will,” Beaudry agreed promptly.

The half-hooded eyes of the cripple slid to the girl and back again to Roy.  He had a way of dry-washing the backs of his hands like Uriah Heep.

“Fine.  You’ll stay to dinner, now, of course.  That’s good.  That’s good.  Young folks don’t know how it pleasures an old man to meet up with them sometimes.”  His low voice was as smooth as oil.

Beaudry conceived a horror of the man.  The veiled sneer behind the smile on the sapless face, the hooded hawk eyes, the almost servile deference, held a sinister threat that chilled the spine of his guest.  The young man thought of him as of a repulsive spider spinning a web of trouble that radiated from this porch all over the Big Creek country.

“Been taking pictures of each other, I reckon.  Fine.  Fine.  Now, I wonder, Miss Beulah, if you’d do an old man a favor.  This porch is my home, as you might say, seeing as how I’m sorter held down here.  I’d kinder like a picture of it to hang up, providing it ain’t asking too much of you.”