idge-top, I could at
least keep in sight of the house by the clump of oaks on the hillside.
Last week I should have moped and fumed here, and cursed my luck in
being bound to a log on a day like this. Now I turned my face to the
sunlight and drank in the keen air. Now I whistled as merry a tune as
I knew.

"You seem to take well with solitude," came a voice behind me.

Looking about, I saw Robert Weston fighting his way through the thicket.

"I take better to company," I said. "Why have you deserted the others?"

Weston sat down at my side with his gun across his knees.

"Arnold Arker says there is a fox in that hollow," he answered. "You
can hear the dogs now, and he thinks if they start him, this is as good
a place as any, as he is likely to run over on Buzzard ridge, and
double back this way, or he'll give us a sight of him as he breaks from
the gully. Then as we went away, I looked back and saw you sitting
here and I envied you, for yours is the most comfortable post in all
the ridges."

"When you could be somewhere else, yes," said I. "Having to sit here,
I should prefer running closer to the dogs."

"As you have to stay here, I'd rather sit with you, and after all what
could be better?" Weston laughed. "You know, Mark, in all the valley
you are the man I get along with best."

"Because I've never tried to find out why you were here."

"For that reason I told you," said he. "How simple it was, too. There
was no cause for mystery."

"It would still be a mystery to Elmer Spiker, say. He can't conceive a
man living in the country by choice."

"To Elmer Spiker--indeed, to most of the folks around here, the city is
man's natural environment. It's just bad luck to be country-born."

"Exactly," said I.

Weston is a keen fellow. There was a quiet, cynical smile on his face
as he sat there beating a tattoo on his leggings with a hickory twig.

"Look at your brother," he exclaimed after a while. "I always told Tim
that if he knew what was best he'd stay right here and----"

"If you told him that now, he would laugh at you," I interrupted.

Weston looked surprised.

"Does he like work?" he exclaimed.

"The boy is in love," I answered.

Weston dropped the hickory twig, and turning, gazed at me.

"I knew that," he said. "I knew that long ago."

"With Edith Parker," I hastened to explain. "You know her?"

"Oh--oh," he muttered.

He pulled out a cigar-case and a box of matches and spent