pon that venture, and repeating to
himself the incontestable fact of its utter folly.

The dark was intense, blue-black, about his dwelling. He struck a match at
the edge of the porch, a pointed, orange exclamation on the impenetrable
gloom. Clare, weary of waiting, had gone to bed; her door was shut, her
window tightly closed. The invisible stream gurgled sadly past its banks,
the whippoorwills throbbed with ceaseless, insistent passion.

A sudden, jumbled vision of the past woven about this dwelling, his home,
wheeled through Gordon's mind, scenes happy and unhappy; prevailing want
and slim, momentary plenty; his father dead, in his coffin with a stony,
pinched countenance, a jaw still unrelaxed above the bright flag that
draped his nondescript uniform. Later events followed--his elder, vanished
brother bullying him; the brief romance of his sister's courtship; the
high, strident voice of his mother, that had always reminded him of her
angry red nose--events familiar, sordid, unlovely, but now they seemed all
of a piece of desirable, melancholy happiness; they endowed with a
hitherto unsuspected value every board of the rough footing of the
Makimmon dwelling, every rood of the poor, rocky soil, the weedy grass. He
said aloud, in a subdued, jarring voice, "By God, but Simmons won't get
it!" But the dreary whippoorwills, the feverish crickets, offered him no
confirmation, no assurance.

IX

At noon, on the day following, he stood on the top of Cheap Mountain,
gazing back into the deep, verdant cleft of Greenstream. From Cheap the
reason for its name was clear--it flowed now direct, now turning, in a
vivid green stream along the bases of its mountainous ranges; it flowed
tranquil and dark and smooth between banks of tangled saplings, matted,
multifarious underbrush, towering, venerable trees. It slipped like a
river, bearing upon its balmy surface the promise of asylum, of sleep, of
plenty, through the primitive, ruthless forest, which in turn pressed upon
it everywhere the menace of its oblivion, its fierce, strangling life.

He saw below him stretches of the steep, rocky trail by which he had
mounted with the mounting sun; both had now reached the zenith of their
day's journey; from there he would sink into the shadow, the
secretiveness, of night.... Greenstream village lay twenty-eight miles
behind; it was seventeen more to Sprucesap: he hurried forward.

In his pocket rested not the thirty dollars, to wh