where he had lived to see the town and county of Greenstream
crystallize about his log walls and stony patch.

There, finally breaking down the resistance of a heroic constitution, he
had succeeded in drinking himself to death. His son had grown up imbued
with local tradition and ideas, and was settling seriously to a repetition
of the elder's fate, when the Civil War offered him a wide, recognized
field for the family belligerent spirit. He was improving this chance to
the utmost with Morley's Raiders when a slug ended his activities in the
second year of the war.

It was characteristic of the Makimmons that they should each have left
their family in precarious circumstances. They were not, they would
contemptuously assert, farmers or merchants. When the timber was cut from
the valley, the underbrush burned, and the superb cloth of grass started
that had formed the foundation of a number of comfortable fortunes, the
Makimmons, scornful of the effort, had remained outside the profit.

Such income as they enjoyed had been obtained from renting their acres to
transient and indifferent farmers. In the crises of life and death, or
under the desire for immediate and more liquor, they sold necessary
slices. This continued until nothing remained for the present Gordon
Makimmon but the original dwelling--now grotesquely misshapen from the
addition of casual sheds and extensions--and a small number of acres on
the outskirts of town.

There he lived with Clare, his sister. Their mother, the widow of that
Makimmon whose disputatious temper had been dignified by the epitaph of
"heroic sacrifice," had died of a complicity of patent medicines the
winter before. An older brother had totally disappeared from the
cognizance of Greenstream during Gordon's boyhood; and a married sister,
completing the tale, lived at the opposite end of the county, held close
by poverty and her own large brood.

Summer and winter Gordon Makimmon drove the stage between Greenstream and
Stenton. At dawn he left Greenstream, arriving in Stenton at the end of
day; the following morning he re-departed for Greenstream. This
mechanical, monotonous routine satisfied his need without placing too
great a strain on his energy; he enjoyed rolling over the summer roads or
in the crisp clear sunlight of winter; he liked the casual converse of the
chance passengers, the inevitable deference to his local knowledge, the
birdlike chatter and flattery of the young women