They were still much excited, and told so wild and curious a story of their adventure that after breakfast the old Squire and Addison drove over to Lurvey's Mills to investigate.
Almost the first thing they saw when they reached the Mills was that old "daguerreotype saloon," standing beside the road near the post office, and pottering about it a large, ungainly man--a hunchback with club feet.
A few minutes' conversation with him cleared up the mystery.

This was the first he had heard that two girls had ridden in his "saloon" the night before! His name, he told them, was Duchaine, and he said that he came from Lewiston, Maine.
"Maybe you've heard of me," he said to Addison, with a somewhat painful smile.

"The boys down there call me Big Pumplefoot." Unable to do ordinary work, he had learned to take ambrotypes and set up as an itinerant photographer.

But ere long his mother, who was a French Canadian, had gone back to live at Megantic in the Province of Quebec; and in June the year before he set off to visit her.

Thinking that he might find customers at Megantic, he had taken his "saloon" along with him; but when he got to Dresser's Lonesome he found the road so much obstructed that he left the "saloon" behind, and went on with his horse and the forward wheels.
An accident had laid him up at Megantic during the winter and spring, but later in the season he started for Maine.