house. For nearly an hour things went on as before, and then Mr. Coburn
reappeared at his hall door, this time accompanied by his daughter. Both
were dressed extraordinarily well for such a backwater of civilization,
he with a gray Homburg hat and gloves, she as before in brown, but in a
well-cut coat and skirt and a smart toque and motoring veil. Both
were carrying dust coats. Mr. Coburn drew the door to, and they walked
towards the mill and were lost to sight behind it. Some minutes passed,
and between the screaming of the saws the sound of a motor engine became
audible. After a further delay a Ford car came out from behind the shed
and moved slowly over the uneven sward towards the lane. In the car were
Mr. and Miss Coburn and a chauffeur.

Hilliard had been following every motion through his glass, and he now
thrust the instrument into his companion's hand, crying softly:

"Look, Merriman. Is that the lorry driver you saw?" Merriman focused
the glass on the chauffeur and recognized him instantly. It was the same
dark, aquiline-featured man who had stared at him so resentfully on the
occasion of his first visit to the mill, some two months earlier.

"By Jove, what an extraordinary stroke of luck!" Hilliard went on
eagerly. "All three of them that know you out of the way! We can go
down to the place now and ask for Mr. Coburn, and maybe we shall have
a chance to see inside that shed. Let's go at once, before they come
back."

They crawled away from their point of vantage into the wood, and
retracing their steps to the boat, put it together and carried it to the
river. Then rowing up-stream, they reached the end of the wharf, where a
flight of wooden steps came down into the stream. Here they went ashore,
after making the painter fast to the woodwork.

The front of the wharf, they had seen from the boat, was roughly though
strongly made. At the actual edge, there was a row of almost vertical
piles, pine trees driven unsquared. Behind these was a second row,
inclined inwards. The feet of both rows seemed to be pretty much in the
same line, but the tops of the raking row were about six feet behind the
others, the arrangement, seen from the side, being like a V of which one
leg is vertical. These tops were connected by beams, supporting a timber
floor. Behind the raking piles rough tree stems had been laid on the top
of each other horizontally to hold back the earth filled behind them.
The front was about a hundred fe