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The boy whom he addressed, the landlord’s son, a lad of twelve, had been busy staring at the stranger ever since he entered the room. He ran away, but as he ran could not restrain himself from flinging one or two glances back over his shoulder.

“Don’t you smoke, either?” said the stranger to Robbins, his hand to his breast pocket.

“Only a pipe,” answered Robbins. He wished that he didn’t feel an absurd, morbid sympathy for the poor fool’s pluck sneaking into his consciousness.

“What are we waiting for?” The captain whispered it to a mild-eyed, short-bearded man next him; but the captain’s whisper carried far. “Aw, give him rope!” suggested the mild-eyed man; “maybe he ain’t so sandy’s he seems.”

Not seeming to recognize any chill in his reception, the young stranger approached the stove. No one moved to admit him to the inner circle; this, also, he did not seem to observe. “This whole country looks as if you had been having hard times,” he continued. His voice had full, rich, magnetic notes, but its unfamiliar intonations jarred on his hearers; they knew them to belong to the East, and they hated the East. “It’s pretty sad to ride through miles and miles of farming country and see the burned fence-posts that caught fire from the cinders, just lying where they fell, and the smoke not coming out of one farm-house chimney in six. It looks as if the farmers out this way had simply given up the fight.”

“You’ve hit it,” said the mild-eyed man; “they have. Some of them have moved away and some of them have killed themselves, after they’ve lost their stock on chattel mortgages and lost their land to the improvement company. There ought to be lots of ghosts on those abandoned farms and in those houses where the fences are down. This country is full of ghosts. We ain’t much better than ghosts ourselves.”

“It was the three dry years, I suppose.”

“That and the mortgage sharks and the Shylocks from the East,” old Captain Sparks interrupted in a venomous tone; “what pickings the drought left they got.”

“Pretty rough!” said the stranger, declining the combat again. “There’s one man I want to meet here; his name is Russell–Doctor Russell.”

The mild-eyed man explained that his name was Russell; the other men looked puzzled and suspicious. “What’s his little game?” whispered the captain. “It won’t go, whatever it is,” said the man next him. Robbins heard question and answer distinctly; but the young fellow near him did not wince. “Are you the one that wrote to Fairport, Doctor Russell? I guess you must be.”

“Yes, I wrote to Fairport,” said Russell.

“Well, I hope you liked the barrel we sent, and the boxes. They were going to send them to another place, but your letter decided us. That’s my church, you know, which sent them. And, for that matter, it was your letter first turned my father’s attention to investing in your part of the country. Oh, tell me, where did that tea go? My mother would send her best London mixture–“

“Was it your mother?” Robbins spoke. With a red face and a flash of his eyes at the sullen group about him, he withdrew his chair, making a clear passage to the stove. “I’d like to thank her, then, and her son for her; that tea and that quince jam–whose was the quince jam?”

“I rather think my mother put that in, too.”

“Well, it almost cured my wife; it was better than medicine, that and the tea, for, not to mention that we couldn’t get any medicine, it put heart into her as medicine couldn’t. I wonder was it your mother, or who was it put in that volume of college songs? I got that. You wouldn’t think it, but I’m a university man–Harvard–“

The young fellow caught his hand and gripped it hard. “Harvard? So am I–Martin Wallace, ’92.”