he note, if it comes to
that. But the fact is ... I've got a lot of money laid out. What's been
the matter?--the weather has been good, it's rained regular--"

"That's just it," Entriken interrupted; "it's rained too blamed regular.
It is all right for crops, but we've got nothing besides cattle, and
steers wouldn't hardly put on anything the past weeks. Of course, in a
way, grass is cattle, but it just seems they wouldn't take any good in the
wet."

"I suppose it will be all right," Gordon Makimmon assented; "but I can
hardly have the money out so long ... others too."

X

The heat thickened with the dusk. The wailing clamor of William Vibard's
accordion rose from the porch. He had, of late, avoided sitting with Rose
and her husband; they irritated him in countless, insignificant ways.
Rose's superiority had risen above the commonplace details of the house;
she sat on the porch and regarded Gordon with a strained, rigid smile.
After a pretense at procuring work William Vibard had relapsed into an
endless debauch of sound. His manner became increasingly abstracted; he
ate, he lived, with the gestures of a man playing an accordion.

The lines on Gordon's thin, dark face had multiplied; his eyes, in the
shadow of his bony forehead, burned steady, pale blue; his chin was
resolute; but a new doubt, a constant, faint perplexity, blurred the line
of his mouth.

From the road above came the familiar sound of hoof-beats, muffled in
dust, but it stopped opposite his dwelling; and, soon after, the porch
creaked under slow, heavy feet, and a thick, black-clad figure knocked and
entered.

It was the priest, Merlier.

In the past months Gordon had been conscious of an increasing concord with
the silent clerical. He vaguely felt in the other's isolation the wreckage
of an old catastrophe, a loneliness not unlike his, Gordon Makimmon's, who
had killed his wife and their child.

"The Nickles," the priest pronounced, sudden and harsh, "are worthless,
woman and man. They would be bad if they were better; as it is they are
only a drunken charge on charity and the church. They have been stewed in
whiskey now for a month. They make nothing amongst their weeds.--Is it
possible they got a sum from you?"

"Six weeks back," Gordon replied briefly; "two hundred dollars to put a
floor on the bare earth and stop a leaking roof."

"Lies," Merlier commented. "When any one in my church is deserving I will
tell you myself. I thin