She was moving away.

“Then I shall have to go with you,” said the stranger calmly, “if the veteran doesn’t object.  He knows a woman should not go unattended around the valley.  He’d rather see me doing my duty than having a sociable pipe with him and hearing about the war.  How about it, Hope?”

He did not stop to hear my answer.  Had he waited a moment instead of striding after the girl, with his dog at his heels, he might have seen my reply.

[Illustration:  He did not stop to hear my answer.]

I raised my pipe above my head and hurled it against the fence, where it crashed into a score of pieces.

V

“Who is Robert Weston?” I asked of Tim.

“If you can answer that question Theophilus Jones will give you a cigar,” replied my brother.  “He has tried to find out; he has cross-questioned every man, woman, and child that comes to his store, and he admits that he is beaten.”

“When Theop can’t find out, the mystery is impenetrable.”  I recalled our suave storekeeper and his gentle way of drawing from his customers their life secrets as he leaned blandly over the counter with his sole thought apparently to do their commands.  Theophilus had known that I was going to enlist long before I had made up my own mind.  He had told Tim that I was coming home before he had handed him the postal card on which I had scrawled a few lines announcing my return.  So when I heard that Weston was still a puzzle to him I knew that Six Stars had a mystery.  For Six Stars to have a mystery is unusual.  Occasionally we are troubled with ghosts and such supernatural demonstrations, which cause us to keep at home at night, but we soon forget these things if we do not solve them.  But for our village to number among its people a man whose whole history and whose family history was not known was unheard of.  For such a man to be here six weeks and not enlighten us was hardly to be dreamed of.  Robert Weston had dared it.  Even Tim regarded the matter as serious.

“It is suspicious,” he said, shaking his head gravely.

He was cleaning up the supper dishes at the end of the table opposite me.  By virtue of my recent return I had not fallen altogether into our household ways as yet, and sat smoking and watching him.

“It’s mighty odd,” he went on.  “At noon one day, about six weeks ago, Weston rode up to the tavern on a bicycle and told Elmer Spiker he was going to stay to dinner.  He loafed about all that afternoon, and stayed that day and the next, and ever since.  First there came a trunk for him, and then a dog.  You see him about all the time, for when he isn’t walking, he’s loafing around the tavern, or is over at the store, arguing with Henry Holmes or Isaac Bolum.  Yet all we know about him is that he’s undecided how long he’ll stay and that he has lived in New York.”

“Has no one asked him point-blank what he is doing here?”