a brig would be seen dropping anchor in the offing.  She was always from across the water, from the old country, as villagers to this day insist upon calling Europe.  The manor during these peaceful invasions showed signs of life.  Men from the brig went up to the big white house, and remained there for a week or a month.  And they were lean men, battle-scarred and fierce of eye, some with armless sleeves, some with stiff legs, some twisted with rheumatism.  All spoke French, and spat whenever they saw the perfidious flag of old England.  This was not marked against them as a demerit, for the War of 1812 was yet smoking here and there along the Great Lakes.  Suddenly, they would up and away, and the manor would reassume its repellent aloofness.  Each time they returned their number was diminished.  Old age had succeeded war as a harvester.  In 1822, the mysterious old recluse surrendered the ghost.  His heirs—­ignored and hated by him for their affiliation with the Bourbons—­sold it to the father of the admiral.

The manor wasn’t haunted.  The hard-headed longshoremen and sailors who lived at the foot of the hill were a practical people, to whom spirits were something mostly and generally put up in bottles, and emptied on sunless, blustery days.  Still, they wouldn’t have been human if they had not done some romancing.

There were a dozen yarns, each at variance with the other.  First, the old “monseer” was a fugitive from France; everybody granted that.  Second, that he had helped to cut off King Lewis’ head; but nobody could prove that.  Third, that he was a retired pirate; but retired pirates always wound up their days in riotous living, so this theory died.  Fourth, that he had been a great soldier in the Napoleonic wars, and this version had some basis, as the old man’s face was slashed and cut, some of his fingers were missing, and he limped.  Again, he had been banished from France for a share in the Hundred Days.  But, all told, nothing was proved conclusively, though the villagers burrowed and delved and hunted and pried, as villagers are prone to do when a person appears among them and keeps his affairs strictly to himself.

But the next generation partly forgot, and the present only indifferently remembered that, once upon a time, a French emigre had lived and died up there.  They knew all there was to know about the present owner.  It was all compactly written and pictured in a book of history, which book agents sold over the land, even here in Dalton.

All these things Fitzgerald and his companion learned from the driver on the journey up the incline.

“Where was this Frenchman buried?” inquired Breitmann softly.

“In th’ cemet’ry jest over th’ hill.  But nobody knows jest where he is now.  Stone’s gone, an’ th’ ground’s all level that end.  He wus on’y a Frenchman.  But th’ admiral, now you’re talkin’!  He pays cash, an’ don’t make no bargain rates, when he wants a job done.  Go wan, y’ ol’ nag; what y’ dreamin’ of?”