CHAPTER V.

Spencer Vance had become greatly interested in the beautiful Renie during the walk along the beach.  He had become deeply impressed with the purity, yet weirdness of her character.  He had pressed the girl for some reminiscence of her early childhood, but she had no recollections beyond the sea and the fisherman’s cabin where she had lived with old Tom Pearce and his wife.

Her supposed father had for years rowed her every morning across the bay to the mainland, where she had attended the village school, from whence she had passed to the high school, at which her reputed father had supported her for a couple of years.

Mrs. Pearce died suddenly one day after a few hours’ illness.  Just before her death Renie was alone with her in the room.  The woman had been unconscious, but she momentarily recovered consciousness and summoned the girl to her bedside and attempted to communicate some parting intelligence, but alas! she only succeeded in uttering a few disjointed exclamations, suggestive, but not directly and fully intelligible.  The half-uttered exclamations only served to confirm certain suspicions that had long floated unsuggested through the girl’s mind, and her disappointment was bitter when the icy hand of death strangled the communications which the dying woman was seeking to make.

The girl had formed a sort of attachment for Tom Pearce.  The man was a good-natured, jolly sailor sort of a fellow, and, as intimated, had always treated the girl with the utmost kindness and consideration.

It was thus matters stood up to the time of the detective’s strange meeting with the girl upon the beach.

As the girl pointed to the house and concluded the words which close our preceding chapter, she glided away, and left the detective to “work his own passage”.

During the walk along the beach Renie had been a little more explicit in explaining her immediate peril, and our hero was prepared to more intelligently enact the role of the eavesdropper.

The cabin of Tom Pearce, the boatman, was an ordinary fisherman’s hut, built in the midst of white sand-hills, with a few willows planted on a little patch of made earth, and serving as protectors against the fierce summer blaze of the sun.

The detective crept up to the cabin, and climbing upon a rear shed which served as a cover to several boats and a large quantity of nets, he covered himself with a fragment of old sailcloth, and secured a position from where, through a little opening which in the summer was left unclosed, he could see into the main room of the cottage.  He could not only see, but could as readily overhear any conversation that might occur.

Glancing into the room, he saw Tom Pearce, whom he had seen many times before on board several of the boats that sail over the bay.  The fisherman, or rather smuggler, was seated before a table on which stood a ship’s lamp, reading what appeared to be an old time-stained letter, and after an interval he muttered aloud: