



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan, David Garcia
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










THE INN AT THE RED OAK

BY LATTA GRISWOLD

1917




[Illustration: "It's a treasure right enough!" cried Dan.]




CONTENTS


PART I
THE OLD MARQUIS

I     THE MARQUIS ARRIVES AT THE INN

II    THE LION'S EYE

III   THE MARQUIS AT NIGHT

IV    THE OAK PARLOUR

V     THE WALK THROUGH THE WOODS


PART II
THE TORN SCRAP OF PAPER

VI    THE HALF OF AN OLD SCRAP OF PAPER

VII   A DISAPPEARANCE

VIII  GREEN LIGHTS

IX    RECOLLECTIONS OF A FRENCH EXILE

X     MIDNIGHT VIGILS


PART III
THE SCHOONER IN THE COVE

XI    THE SOUTHERN CROSS

XII   TOM TURNS THE TABLES

XIII  MADAME DE LA FONTAINE

XIV   IN THE FOG

XV    NANCY

XVI   MADAME AT THE INN

XVII  THE MARQUIS LEAVES THE INN


PART IV
THE ATTACK ON THE INN

XVIII THE AVENUE OF MAPLES

XIX   THE ATTACK

XX    THE OAK PARLOUR

XXI   THE TREASURE




The Inn at the Red Oak




PART I

THE OLD MARQUIS



CHAPTER I

THE MARQUIS ARRIVES AT THE INN


By the end of the second decade of the last century Monday Port had
passed the height of prosperity as one of the principal depots for the
West Indian trade. The shipping was rapidly being transferred to New York
and Boston, and the old families of the Port, having made their fortunes,
in rum and tobacco as often as not, were either moving away to follow the
trade or had acquiesced in the changed conditions and were settling down
to enjoy the fruit of their labours. The harbour now was frequently
deserted, except for an occasional coastwise trader; the streets began to
wear that melancholy aspect of a town whose good days are more a memory
than a present reality; and the old stage roads to Coventry and Perth
Anhault were no longer the arteries of travel they once had been.

To the east of Monday Port, across Deal Great Water, an estuary of the
sea that expanded almost to the dignity of a lake, lay a pleasant rolling
wooded country known in Caesarea as Deal. It boasted no village, scarcely
a hamlet. Dr. Jeremiah Watson, a famous pedagogue and a graduate of
Kingsbridge, had started his modest establishment for "the education of
the sons of gentlemen" on Deal Hill; there were half-a-dozen prospering
farms, Squire Pembroke's Red Farm and Judge Meath's curiously lonely but
beautiful House on the Dunes among them; a little Episcopalian chapel on
the shores of the Strathsey river, a group of houses at the cross roads
north of Level's Woods, and the Inn at the Red Oak,--and that was all.

In its day this inn had been a famous hostelry, much more popular with
travellers than the ill-kept provincial hotels in Monday Port; but now
for a long time it had scarcely provided a livelihood for old Mrs. Frost,
widow of the famous Peter who for so many years had been its popular
host. No one knew when the house had been built; though there was an old
corner stone on which local antiquarians professed to decipher the
figures "1693," and that year was assigned by tradition as the date of
its foundation.

It was a long crazy building, with a great sloping roof, a wide porch
running its entire length, and attached to its sides and rear in all
sorts of unexpected ways and places were numerous out houses and offices.
Behind its high brick chimneys rose the thick growth of Lovel's Woods,
crowning the ridge that ran between Beaver Pond and the Strathsey river
to the sea. The house faced southwards, and from the cobbled court before
it meadow and woodland sloped to the beaches and the long line of sand
dunes that straggled out and lost themselves in Strathsey Neck. To the
east lay marshes and the dunes and beyond them the Strathsey, two miles
wide where its waters met those of the Atlantic; west lay the great
curve, known as the Second Beach, the blue surface of Deal Bay, and a
line of rocky shore, three miles in length, terminated by Rough Point,
near which began the out-lying houses of Monday Port.

The old hostelry took its name from a giant oak which grew at its
doorstep just to one side