ow hair and mustache."

"Did they give any names?" asked Smith.

"You bet. The stout, dark man calls himself Hongri Picket. French, I
guess. The fat beak is a fella names Sard. Sanchez is the guy with a
face like a Canada priest -- Jose Sanchez -- or something on that style.
And then the yellow skinned young man is Nichole Salzar; the Britisher,
Harry Beck; and that good lookin' dark gent with a little black Charlie
Chaplin, he's Victor Georgiades."

"What are those foreigners doing in the North Woods, Clinch?" enquired
Smith.

"Oh, they all give the same spiel -- hire out in a lumber camp. But
_they_ ain't no lumberjacks," added Clinch contemptuously. I don't know
what they be -- hootch runners maybe -- or booze bandits -- or they done
something crooked som'ers r'other. It's safe to serve 'em drinks."

Clinch himself had been drinking. He always drank when preparing to
cook.

He turned and went into the kitchen now, rolling up his shirt sleeves
and relighting his clay pipe.

* * * * *

IV

By nine o'clock the noisy chicken supper had ended; the table had been
cleared; Jim Hastings was tuning his fiddle in the big room; Eve had
seated herself before the battered melodeon.

"Ladies and gents," said Clinch in his clear, pleasant voice, which
carried through the hubbub, "we're going to have dance -- thanks and
beholden to Jim Hastings and my daughter Eve. Eve, she don't drink and
she don't dance, so no use askin' and no hard feelin' toward nobody.

"So act up pleasant to one and all and have a good time and no rough
stuff in no form, shape, or manner, but behave like gents all and swell
dames, like you was to a swarry on Fifth Avenue. Let's go!"

He went back to the pantry, taking no notice of the cheering. The
fiddler scraped a fox trot, and Eve's melodeon joined in. A vast
scuffling of heavily shod feet filled the momentary silence, accented by
the shrill giggle of young girls.

"They're off," remarked Clinch to Smith, who stood at the pantry shelf
prepared to serve whiskey or beer upon previous receipt of payment.

In the event of a sudden raid, the arrangements at Clinch's were quite
simple. Two large drain pipes emerged from the kitchen floor beside
Smith, and ended in Star Pond. In case of alarm the tub of beer was
poured down one pipe; the whiskey down the other.

Only the trout in Star Pond would ever sample that hootch again.

Clinch, now slightly intoxicated, leaned heavily on t