ted.

"Tell me," she said, while the others examined the curios the hermit had
for sale, "what kind of man is this you left in your house? And who is
he?"

"Law bless ye!" said the old man. "I don't know him from Adam's off ox.
Never seed him afore. But he was trampin' of it; and he didn't have much
money. An' to tell you the truth, Miss, that hutch of mine ain't wuth much
money."

She described the man who had been playing the hermit since the Alectrion
Film Corporation crowd had come to Beach Plum Point.

"That's the fella," said the old man, nodding.

Ruth stood aside while he waited on his customers and digested these
statements regarding the man who claimed the authorship of the scenario of
"Plain Mary."

Not that Ruth would have desired to acknowledge the scenario in its
present form. She felt angry every time she thought of how her plot had
been mangled.

But she was glad to learn all that was known about the Beach Plum Point
hermit. And she had learned one most important fact.

He was not a regular hermit. As Jennie Stone suggested, he was not a
"union hermit" at all. And he was a stranger to the neighborhood of
Herringport. If he had been at the Point only three weeks, as this old man
said, "John, the hermit," might easily have come since Ruth's scenario was
stolen back there at the Red Mill!

Her thoughts began to mill again about this possibility. She wished she
was back at the camp so as to put the strange old man through a
cross-examination regarding himself and where he had come from. She had no
suspicion as to how Mr. Hammond had so signally failed in this very
matter.

CHAPTER XXII

AN ARRIVAL

Mr. Hammond was in no placid state of mind himself after the peculiarly
acting individual who called himself "John, the hermit," left his office.
The very fact that the man refused to tell anything about his personal
affairs--who he really was, or where he came from--induced the moving
picture producer to believe there must be something wrong about him.

Mr. Hammond went to the door of the shack and watched the man tramping up
the beach toward the end of the point. What a dignified stride he had!
Rather, it was the stride of a poseur--like nothing so much as that of the
old-time tragedian, made famous by the Henry Irving school of actors.

"An ancient 'ham' sure enough, just as the boys say," muttered the
manager.

The so-called hermit disappeared. The moving picture people were gatheri