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He had gone, he said, on business to Winterport, and on the wharf, early one morning, had met a man in the dress of a sailor leading the white horse. In answer to inquiries, the stranger said he had taken the horse In payment of a debt, and was about to ship him on board a trading-vessel then lying in the dock, bound to the East Indies. Would he sell, the minister asked, on this side of the water?
The Hermanns built their house at the very end of the island, five or six miles from the more or less violently rustic "summer-cottages" which adorned the hills and bluffs around the native village of Winterport.
She was about sixty feet long, with a low cabin forward, a cockpit aft, and a raised place for the steersman amidship a good-looking craft, and evidently very speedy. She carried no flag or pennant. She came driving on, full tilt, straight toward us. We supposed of course she would turn east through the narrow channel to Winterport, or sheer off to the west into the Southern Way and go up the bay.
"Of course the minister felt sorry and ashamed when he learned, in this public way, of the low company Peter had kept in his youth. Whenever a traveling circus had stopped at Winterport, Parson Lorrimer had not failed to warn his young people from the pulpit to keep their feet from straying to this place of sinful amusement.
"Three days later a boy about thirteen years old turned up at Winterport. He came from a village at the northeast corner of the bay forty miles away. He guessed the boat was his father's, but couldn't say for sure until he had seen it. So he came down to the point and identified it beyond a doubt. He told his story very simply.
In answer to all questions, the parson said he had purchased the horse at Winterport, of a seafaring man, that he was eight years old, and his name was Peter. But to neither man nor woman in Hilltown did he ever tell the sum he paid in yellow gold and good bank-notes for the white horse,
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