“‘Awk! hawk!’ he gasps, chokin’, ‘I’m drownded.’

“I let him be drownded, for the minute.  I had the launch to think of, and somehow or ‘nother I got hold of her rodin’ and hauled the anchor up above tide mark.  Then I attended to my passenger.

“‘Where are we?’ he asks.

“I looked around.  Close by was nothin’ but beach-grass and seaweed and sand.  A little ways off was a clump of scrub pines and bayberry bushes that looked sort of familiar.  And back of them was a little board shanty that looked more familiar still.  I rubbed the salt out of my eyes.

“‘Well!’ says I.  ‘I swan to man!’

“‘What is it?’ he says.  ‘Do you know where we are?  Whose house is that?’

“I looked hard at the shanty.

“‘Humph!’ I grunted.  ‘I do declare!  Talk about a feller’s comin’ back to his own.  Whose shanty is that?  Well, it’s mine, if you want to know.  The power that looks out for the lame and the lazy has hove us ashore on Woodchuck Island, and that’s a piece of real estate I own.’

“It sounds crazy enough, that’s a fact; but it was true.  Woodchuck Island is a little mite of a sand heap off in the bay, two mile from shore and ten from the nighest town.  I’d bought it and put up a shanty for a gunnin’ shack; took city gunners down there, once in a while, the fall before.  That summer I’d leased it to a friend of mine, name of Darius Baker, who used it while he was lobsterin’.  The gale had driven us straight in from sea, ’way past Sandy P’int and on to the island.  ‘Twas like hittin’ a nail head in a board fence, but we’d done it.  Shows what Providence can do when it sets out.

“I explained some of this to Williams as we waded through the sand to the shanty.

“‘But is this Baker chap here now?’ he asks.

“‘I’m afraid not,’ says I.  ’The lobster season’s about over, and he was goin’ South on a yacht this week.  Still, he wa’n’t to go till Saturday and perhaps—­’

“But the shanty was empty when we got there.  I fumbled around in the tin matchbox and lit the kerosene lamp in the bracket on the wall.  Then I turned to Williams.

“‘Well,’ says I, ‘we’re lucky for once in—­’

“Then I stopped.  When he went overboard the water had washed off his hat.  Likewise it had washed off his long black hair—­which was a wig—­and his head was all round and shiny and bald, like a gull’s egg out in a rain storm.”

“I knew he wore a wig,” interrupted Phinney.

“Of course you do.  Everybody does now.  But he wa’n’t such a prophet in Israel then as he’s come to be since, and folks wa’n’t acquainted with his personal beauties.

“‘What are you starin’ at?’ he asks.

“I fetched a long breath.  ‘Nothin’,’ says I.  ‘Nothin’.’

“But for the rest of that next ha’f hour I went around in a kind of daze, as if my wig had gone and part of my head with it.  When a feller has been doin’ a puzzle it kind of satisfies him to find out the answer.  And I’d done my puzzle.