CHAPTER III

 What has happened?

The baggage-car door was wheeled wide open again and the lamps on the platform shone in.  There was the forward brakeman to “jump” her down from the high doorway, and Reno, with the little red light still hung to his collar, bounded after her.

The conductor bustled away to tell the station master about the dog with the red light, and of the word scrawled on the cloth which Ruth had found wound around his collar.  Indeed, Ruth herself was very anxious and very much excited regarding this mystery; but she was anxious, too, about herself.  Was Uncle Jabez here to meet her?  Or had he sent somebody to take her to the Red Mill?  He had been informed by Miss True Pettis the week before on which train to expect his niece.

Carrying her bag and followed dejectedly by the huge mastiff, Ruth started down the long platform.  The conductor ran out of the station, signalled the train crew with his hand, and lanterns waved the length of the train.  Panting, with its huge springs squeaking, the locomotive started the string of cars.  Faster and faster the train moved, and before Ruth reached the pent-house roof of the little brick station, the tail-lights of the last car had passed her.

A short, bullet-headed old man, with close-cropped, whitish-yellow hair, atop of which was a boy’s baseball cap, his face smoothly shaven and deeply lined, and the stain of tobacco at either corner of his mouth, was standing on the platform.  He was not a nice looking old man at all, he was dressed in shabby and patched garments, and his little eyes seemed so sly that they were even trying to hide from each other on either side of a hawksbill nose.

He began to eye Ruth curiously as the girl approached, and she, seeing that he was the only person who gave her any attention, jumped to the conclusion that this was Uncle Jabez.  The thought shocked her.  She instinctively feared and disliked this queer looking old man.  The lump in her throat that would not be swallowed almost choked her again, and she winked her eyes fast to keep from crying.

She would, in her fear and disappointment, have passed the old man by without speaking had he not stepped in front of her.

“Where d’ye wanter go, Miss?” he whined, looking at her still more sharply out of his narrow eyes.  “Yeou be a stranger here, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” admitted Ruth.

“Where are you goin’?” asked the man again, and Ruth had enough Yankee blood in her to answer the query by asking: 

“Are you Mr. Jabez Potter?”

“Me Jabez Potter?  Why, ef I was Jabe Potter I’d be owing myself money, that’s what I’d be doin’.  You warn’t never lookin’ for Jabe Potter?”

Much relieved, Ruth admitted the fact frankly.  “He is my uncle, sir,” she said.  “I am going to live at the Red Mill.”

The strange old man puckered up his lips into a whistle, and shook his head, eyeing her all the time so slily that Ruth was more and more thankful that he had not proven to be Uncle Jabez.