rmer as he climbed
awkwardly up to a front seat could not but give his young friends
pleasure also.

"You must have been up pretty early if you walked to town this morning,"
observed Worth to the old gentleman at his side.

"Y-a-a-a-s," Mr. Peek replied, drawing the word out to great length, as
if he were really thinking of something else. And after a long pause he
said, "Did I tell you t'other day about someone bein' around my house in
the night?"

Yes, he had told them, the boys answered, and he went on: "It has
fretted me every day. An' last evenin' I got to feelin' so down in the
mouth and glum I just concluded I'd get some cartridges for my old
rifle. It'd make me feel safer to know I had a loaded gun right handy.
So I went to town first thing this mornin'. I might 'a' drove, but my
old horse is 'bout the same as I be,--almost ready to say good-bye."

Mr. Peek was lost for a time in his own meditations. The Torpedo whirred
along at an easy speed and he seemed to enjoy greatly the pleasant
motion of the car and gentle sweep of the wind. "'Tain't much like water
power, is it?" he remarked, as if he had been contrasting in his mind
the machinery and appliances of _his_ young manhood with the automobiles
and electric motors of the present day. "I suspect you boys never saw a
water wheel," he said musingly.

No, they had not, said Billy, and in answer to a question whether they
would like to see one, both he and Paul were quite sure they would.

The car was rumbling along the lonely South Fork now. The old mill, the
gray, old house of the miller, empty and cheerless, the pond and the
icehouse were but a little way forward.

"If you'd like to stop at the mill, I'll show you a water wheel," said
Mr. Peek. "And it'd have been runnin' yet, but--" Not finishing this
sentence, the possible conclusion of which the boys could easily guess,
the old gentleman after a little hesitation continued: "I can't get
around like I used to and not as much as I ought to. I ain't been in the
mill for nigh onto two years."

Billy halted the car before the weather-worn buildings. He glanced
toward Paul as if he felt some misgiving in entering the ruins of the
once busy place in company with the ruin of him whose wrecked hopes were
responsible for all the gloom and decay in this otherwise charming
valley.

But if Jones was in any degree apprehensive, he did not show it. Truly,
too, it was interesting and surely there was nothing to f