, far away in some distant part of the house.

CHAPTER 3

The last reverberations of sound hung in the air and jangled in
Chris's head. Of the many times he had examined Mr. Wicker's window
and pored over the rope, the ship and the Nubian boy, he had never
gone into Mr. Wicker's shop. So now, alone until someone should answer
the bell, he looked eagerly, if uneasily, around him.

What with the one window and the lowering day outside, the long narrow
shop was somber. The ceiling seemed close above Chris's head. Heavy
hand-hewn beams crossed it from one side to the other. A few dusty
pieces of furniture stood about, whether for sale or for use Chris
could not determine, and almost lost in the black shadows at the far
end were what appeared to be boxes and bales, piled one upon the
other.

[Illustration]

The growing silence, now the bell had stopped, gripped Chris. A chill
made itself felt in his feet and spread rapidly over his body so that
he gave a convulsive shiver. He was about to turn and go out when, at
the farthest end of the gloomy shop, a small primrose oblong of light
seeped for a little way along the floor and a door opened.
Fascinated, Chris stared, as into this distant pallor stepped the
short and remarkably spidery figure of a man. Mr. Wicker's back being
toward the source of light, Chris could not see his face. The figure
paused, with a fragile hand scarcely bigger than that of a child's on
the doorhandle, and then came forward.

The silence, Chris noticed, was still unbroken as Mr. Wicker advanced
toward him, and Chris shuddered again as he stood waiting and
watching, but whether it was with cold or with fear--and the room was
indeed very dank and unaired--it would have been hard to say.

When Mr. Wicker had come within a few feet of Chris, the final
vestiges of daylight from outside reached the extraordinary man facing
the boy, and for the first time Chris was able to examine the old man
who was more legend than fact throughout Georgetown.

William Wicker's face in itself was not forbidding. What made an icy
mouse seem to run the length of Chris's spine was the impression of
enormous age in the appearance of the man confronting him. The thin
lips crackled the withered and multi-wrinkled cheeks in the ghost of
what had once been a smile. The nose, once hawk-like and proud and
denoting strength of character and purpose, was now pinched by the
ever-tightening fingers of a progression of ye