ought to be, I
find--another man after what I'm after! Another man!"

"Have you any idea who he may be?" I asked.

He hesitated--and then suddenly shook his head.

"I haven't!" he answered. "No, I haven't, and that's a fact. For a
minute or two, in there, I thought that maybe I did know, or, at any
rate, had a notion; but it's a fact, I haven't. All the same, I'm
going Denwick way, to see if I can come across whoever it is, or get
news of him. Is that your road, master?"

"No," I replied. "I'm going some way farther along the headlands.
Well--I hope you'll be successful in your search for the family
gravestones."

He nodded, very seriously.

"I'm not going out o' this country till I've found 'em!" he asserted
determinedly. "It's what I've come three hundred miles for. Good-day,
master."

He turned off by the track that led over the top of the headlands, and
as long as I watched him went steadily forward without even looking
back, or to the right or left of him. And presently I, too, went on my
way, and rounding another corner of the cliff left the lonely inn
behind me.

* * * * *

But as I went along, following the line of the headlands, I wondered a
good deal about Salter Quick and the conversation at the Mariner's
Joy. What was it that this hard-bitten, travel-worn man, one who had
seen, evidently, much of wind and wave, was really after? I gave no
credence to his story of the family relationship--it was not at all
likely that a man would travel all the way from Devonshire to
Northumberland to find the graves of his mother's ancestors. There was
something beyond that--but what? It was very certain that Quick wanted
to come across the tombs of the dead and gone Netherfields, however,
for whatever purpose--certain, too, that there was another man who had
the same wish. That complicated matters, and it deepened the mystery.
Why did two men--seafaring men, both of them--arrive in this
out-of-the-way spot about the same time, unknown to each other, but
each apparently bent on the same object? And what would happen if, as
seemed likely, they met? It was impossible to find an answer to these
questions; but the mystery was there, all the same.

The afternoon remained fine, and, for the time of year, warm, and I
took advantage of it by dawdling along that glorious stretch of
sea-coast, taking in to the full its rich stores of romantic scenery
and suggestion of long-past ages. Someti