“I wonder if they will ever be open,” thought Charlie.

He remembered the river view that was possible from the “cupelo” above, and he said, “Guess I’ll climb up and see what the weather is.”  Charlie was not a very experienced weather-observer, but he thought he would like to obtain a wider outlook than the lane window had afforded him.  He planted an eye between the slats of his watch-tower and then looked off.  The view was neither extensive nor varied, mostly one of mud-flats.  A thick fog had come from the sea and stretched like a curtain across the mouth of the dock in the rear of Aunt Stanshy’s premises.  The low tide had left in the dock a stretch of ugly flats, out of which stuck various family relics like pots and kettles, then pots and kettles again, and finally a dead cat.  Charlie saw several tall chimneys in the neighborhood, but the buildings they decorated had been covered by the fog, and the chimneys looked like a vessel’s masts from which the hull had drifted away, leaving them standing in depths of river-mud.  Toward the sea it was only mist, mist that looked extensive enough to reach as far as London, whose fog-lovers would have welcomed it.  Did the dock, the tall chimneys, the mist, notice that curious eye up in the “cupelo” looking through the slats and watching them?

“Guess I’ll go down,” said their owner.

The mist continued to wrap Seamont all that day and far into the night.

Will Somers was preparing to leave Dr. Tilton’s store that evening.  He had sent off medicine to quiet the last earache in town that had been heard from.  He had also given powders to make poor Miss Persnips sleep quietly.  She was sick with a nervous fever.  Will now closed the store, turned the key in the lock, and went up the street, whistling “The Star-Spangled Banner.”  It was half after ten.  One by one the house-lamps had been extinguished, and it was “dark as a pocket” in the lane.  Still whistling, Will neared Aunt Stanshy’s.  He ceased his tune suddenly for he caught an outcry.

“Where does that come from!” asked Will.  “Back of the barn, I guess.  There it is again!  It is from the dock, I know, sure as I’m born.”

He sprang across Aunt Stanshy’s garden and then leaped a fence which separated her estate from an open piece of ground bordering the dock and used for various purposes.  Fishermen dried their fish here on long flakes.  Around three sides of the dock went a stone wall, against which the tide washed and rippled, mildly grumbling because the wall was stubborn and would not budge an inch.  On the stone wall bordering the upper end of the dock rested that side of Aunt Stanshy’s barn in which were the fastened door below and the fastened window above.

Will, having leaped the fence, ran past the fish-flakes to the edge of the stone dock-wall.  It was so dark that his running was neither rapid nor straight.

“Somebody is down in the dock,” thought Will.  “Don’t worry!” he shouted, “I am here.”