who paid him scant attention, he read whatever he
liked, and as a result, his head was full of romantic road-agents
delightfully kind to little crippled daughters at home, fierce
pirates who supported aged and respectable mothers, and considerate
bandits who restored valuable watches when told that they were
prized on account of tender associations.

His imagination had been still further fed by certain local legends
and happenings, highly colored enough to excite the keenest
interest. Ellmington is, as has been said, near the Canadian border.
The place abounds in tales of smuggling, and the popular gossip, as
gossip everywhere has a pleasing way of doing, associates the names
of the most respectable and unlikely people with the disreputable
ventures of the smugglers.

Of course a story of contraband trade is the more striking if the
narrator can hint that the judge of probate or the most stern of
village deacons might tell a good deal if he were disposed, and
there are always persons ready to give this sort of interest to
their "yarns."

In Ellmington lived Jake Farnum, an ex-deputy marshal and an
incorrigible liar, about whom gathered the boys, Jim among them, to
hear exciting stories of chase and detection, exactly as boys in a
seaport town gather about an old sailor to hear tales of pirates and
buccaneers. And Jake loved to hint darkly that the best people
shared in the illicit traffic.

With it all, Jim's sense of right and wrong was in a fair way to
become hopelessly "mixed." Exactly as boys at the seashore are prone
to believe that a pirate is, on the whole, an admirable character,
so these border boys, and especially Jim, had come to feel--only
with more excuse, because of the generally indulgent view of the
community--that smuggling is an occupation in which any one may
engage with credit, and which is much more interesting than most.

Now it is not likely that Jim's father, a stern, secretive,
obviously prosperous man, with an intermittent business which
took him back and forth across the border, could in all this
gossip escape a touch of suspicion. No one, of course, denied
that he really did deal in lumber and cattle; the fact was
obvious. But there were hints and whispers, shrewd shakings
of the head, and more than one "guessed" that all Edwards's
profits "didn't come from cattle, no, nor lumber, neither."

Latterly these whispers had become more definite. Pete Lamoury,
a French-Canadian, whom Mr.