“Going to give me some land!” repeated Long Adam.

“I apologize for addressing you as if you were a public meeting,” said Fisher, “but I am an entirely new kind of public man who says the same thing in public and in private.  I’ve said this to a hundred huge meetings throughout the country, and I say it to you on this queer little island in this dismal pond.  I would cut up a big estate like this into small estates for everybody, even for poachers.  I would do in England as they did in Ireland—­buy the big men out, if possible; get them out, anyhow.  A man like you ought to have a little place of his own.  I don’t say you could keep pheasants, but you might keep chickens.”

The man stiffened suddenly and he seemed at once to blanch and flame at the promise as if it were a threat.

“Chickens!” he repeated, with a passion of contempt.

“Why do you object?” asked the placid candidate.  “Because keeping hens is rather a mild amusement for a poacher?  What about poaching eggs?”

“Because I am not a poacher,” cried Adam, in a rending voice that rang round the hollow shrines and urns like the echoes of his gun.  “Because the partridge lying dead over there is my partridge.  Because the land you are standing on is my land.  Because my own land was only taken from me by a crime, and a worse crime than poaching.  This has been a single estate for hundreds and hundreds of years, and if you or any meddlesome mountebank comes here and talks of cutting it up like a cake, if I ever hear a word more of you and your leveling lies—­”

“You seem to be a rather turbulent public,” observed Horne Fisher, “but do go on.  What will happen if I try to divide this estate decently among decent people?”

The poacher had recovered a grim composure as he replied.  “There will be no partridge to rush in between.”

With that he turned his back, evidently resolved to say no more, and walked past the temple to the extreme end of the islet, where he stood staring into the water.  Fisher followed him, but, when his repeated questions evoked no answer, turned back toward the shore.  In doing so he took a second and closer look at the artificial temple, and noted some curious things about it.  Most of these theatrical things were as thin as theatrical scenery, and he expected the classic shrine to be a shallow thing, a mere shell or mask.  But there was some substantial bulk of it behind, buried in the trees, which had a gray, labyrinthian look, like serpents of stone, and lifted a load of leafy towers to the sky.  But what arrested Fisher’s eye was that in this bulk of gray-white stone behind there was a single door with great, rusty bolts outside; the bolts, however, were not shot across so as to secure it.  Then he walked round the small building, and found no other opening except one small grating like a ventilator, high up in the wall.  He retraced his steps thoughtfully along the causeway to the banks of the lake, and sat down