FOR some time Spenser had been rowing well in toward the Kentucky shore, to avoid the swift current of the Kentucky River which rushes into the Ohio at Carrollton.

A few yards below its mouth, in the quiet stretch of backwater along shore, lay the wharf-boat, little more than a landing stage.

The hotel was but a hundred feet away, at the top of the steep levee.

It was midnight, so everyone in the village had long been asleep.

After several minutes of thunderous hammering Roderick succeeded in drawing to the door a barefooted man with a candle in his huge, knotted hand--a man of great stature, amazingly lean and long of leg, with a monstrous head thatched and fronted with coarse, yellow-brown hair.