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Captain Acton walked slowly towards Old Harbour Town. He was sunk in thought, and was in deep distress and at a loss to know what to do. He had no machinery of police to command. 1805 was a year very primitive as compared with 1905. He reflected that the first step in the disappearance of his daughter as represented in the statement of Mr Adams might indicate nothing in respect of the real cause of her disappearance. Because, suppose his surmise was correct, and that she had hastened to the help of some afflicted or humble person whom she befriended, she might, after having left the place wherever it was, have met with some disaster; she might have fallen over the cliff—she might on some roundabout way home have been robbed and left for[Pg 197] dying; in short, when a person mysteriously disappears a hundred reasons for his or her envanishment will occur to the mind, and any one of them may so satisfy, so convince, that those who accept it will go to work as though it were the truth though it possess but the very attenuated merit of being a conjecture. He was a man of rough appearance whose hand had been in the tar-bucket for most of his life—a hard, reserved man, shy, so ignorant that he read with difficulty, and wrote his name as painfully as a hand tortured with gout inscribes with the pen. "Go on!" said Mr Lawrence fiercely. "What did she show you?".
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kez_ h (Kez_h)
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"I'll be bound for you, Elinor Kendall, to find the sweetness in every sour apple. Not that your Doris Leighton is sour on the outside. She's much too sweet for my taste. I don't trust them when they're so unearthly sweet."I tried logging in using my phone number and I
was supposed to get a verification code text,but didn't
get it. I clicked resend a couple time, tried the "call
me instead" option twice but didn't get a call
either. the trouble shooting had no info on if the call
me instead fails.There was
"The day arter th' young gen'man was killed."
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Conrad
He smiled and held out his hand. The other man took it dazedly, then slowly and with head lifted towards the darkening skies, he passed down the road. A little smile curled the corners of Maddoc's stern mouth. "Well, that's Pennsylvania Scroggie," he said, as though to himself. "Hard, bull-headed and a sharper in every legitimate sense but square as they make 'em. And you," he asked, pointedly, "what did you do?" Billy was anything but easy in his mind during these exciting days. Who were the two strangers who had searched old Harry's hut? Were they the same two he and Maurice had seen in the woods on the night of the storm? If so, why did they send a message to Hinter, and what was its significance? Where was Gibson's Grove, anyway? These questions bothered him, and pondering upon them robbed him of appetite and sleep. Maurice and Elgin were no help to him in a dilemma of this kind and the new boy, Jim Scroggie, he knew scarcely well enough to trust. "Missus Scraff—you know what a fidgety fly-off-the-handle she is, an' how she suffers from the asthma—well, she'd come over an' was stayin' to supper. I sent that Willium out on the back ridge to gather some wild thimble-berries fer dessert. He comes in just as I had the table all set, that wicked old coon he's made a pet of at his heels an' that devil-eyed crow, Croaker, on his shoulder. Afore I could get hold of the broom, he put the covered pail on the table an' went out ag'in. The coon follered him, but that crow jumped right onto the table an' grabbed a piece of cake. I made a dash at him an' he flopped to Missus Scraff's shoulder. She was chewin' a piece of slippery-ellum bark fer her asthma, an' when his claws gripped her shoulder she shrieked an' like to 'a' choked to death on it..
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