for Tighe to be gruff. He came
to meet them on his crutches, a smile on his yellow, sapless face.
That smile seemed to Roy more deadly than anger. It did not warm the
cold, malignant eyes nor light the mordant face with pleasure. Only
the lips and mouth responded mechanically to it.

"Glad to see you, Miss Beulah. Come in."

He opened the gate and they entered. Presently Beaudry, his blood
beating fast, found himself shaking hands with Tighe. The man had an
odd trick of looking at one always from partly hooded eyes and at an
angle.

"Mr. Street is selling windmills," explained Miss Rutherford. "Brad
Charlton said you were talking of buying one, so here is your chance."

"Yes, I been thinking of it." Tighe's voice was suave. "What is your
proposition, Mr. Street?"

Roy talked the Dynamo Aermotor for fifteen minutes. There was
something about the still look of this man that put him into a cold
sweat.

It was all he could do to concentrate his attention on the patter of a
salesman, but he would not let his mind wander from the single track
upon which he was projecting it. He knew he was being watched closely.
To make a mistake might be fatal.

"Sounds good. I'll look your literature over, Mr. Street. I suppose
you'll be in the park a few days?"

"Yes."

"Then you can come and see me again. I can't come to you so easy,
Mr.--er--"

"Street," suggested Beulah.

"That's right--Street. Well, you see I'm kinder tied down." He
indicated his crutches with a little lift of one hand. "Maybe Miss
Beulah will bring you again."

"Suits me fine if she will," Beaudry agreed promptly.

The half-hooded eyes of the cripple slid to the girl and back again to
Roy. He had a way of dry-washing the backs of his hands like Uriah
Heep.

"Fine. You'll stay to dinner, now, of course. That's good. That's
good. Young folks don't know how it pleasures an old man to meet up
with them sometimes." His low voice was as smooth as oil.

Beaudry conceived a horror of the man. The veiled sneer behind the
smile on the sapless face, the hooded hawk eyes, the almost servile
deference, held a sinister threat that chilled the spine of his guest.
The young man thought of him as of a repulsive spider spinning a web of
trouble that radiated from this porch all over the Big Creek country.

"Been taking pictures of each other, I reckon. Fine. Fine. Now, I
wonder, Miss Beulah, if you'd do an old man a favor. This porch i