he open with a gun on his shoulder. He called to him, cheerily: "Hello,
John! Any luck?"

Jombateeste shook his head. "Nawthing." He hesitated.

"What are you after?"

"Partridge," Jombateeste ventured back.

Jeff could not resist the desire to scoff which always came upon him at
sight of the Canuck. "Oh, pshaw! Why don't you go for woodchucks? They
fly low, and you can hit them on the wing, if you can't sneak on 'em
sitting."

Jombateeste received his raillery in dignified silence, and turned
back into the woods again. He left Durgin in heightened good-humor with
himself and with the world, which had finally so well adapted itself to
his desires and designs.

Jeff watched his resentful going with a grin, and then threw himself
back on the thick bed of dry moss where he had been sitting, and watched
the clouds drifting across the space of blue which the clearing opened
overhead. His own action reminded him of Jackson, lying in the orchard
and looking up at the sky. He felt strangely at one with him, and he
experienced a tenderness for his memory which he had not known before.
Jackson had been a good man; he realized that with a curious sense
of novelty in the reflection; he wondered what the incentives and the
objects of such men as Jackson and Westover were, anyway. Something
like grief for his brother came upon him; not such grief as he had felt,
passionately enough, though tacitly, for his mother, but a regret for
not having shown Jackson during his life that he could appreciate his
unselfishness, though he could not see the reason or the meaning of it.
He said to himself, in their safe remoteness from each other, that he
wished he could do something for Jackson. He wondered if in the course
of time he should get to be something like him. He imagined trying.

He heard sounds again in the edge of the clearing, but he decided that
it was that fool Jombateeste coming back; and when steps approached
softly and hesitantly across the moss, he did not trouble himself to
take his eyes from the clouds. He was only vexed to have his revery
broken in upon.

A voice that was not Jombateeste's spoke: "I say! Can you tell me the
way to the Brooker Institute, or to the road down the mountain?"

Jeff sat suddenly bolt-upright; in another moment he jumped to his
feet. The Brooker Institute was a branch of the Keeley Cure recently
established near the Huddle, and this must be a patient who had wandered
from it, on one of th