and in accepting it his grievance against
Steering lightened, finally appearing to him as an easy thing to dispose
of. Even the letter in his pocket grew less scorching. Sometimes he
forgot, for minutes together, that it was there. Upon the hypothesis
that Steering would "come around" everything smoothed out. Resting
securely upon that hypothesis, Madeira even formulated the words with
which he would take Steering's surrender: "God love us, that's all
right! You just trust to me from now on. From now on I'll look out for
you, my boy." He could hear himself saying that.

At six o'clock, still shaping the day toward the appointment with
Steering, he took a great bevy of men, farmers, stockmen, storekeepers,
to the Canaan Hotel for supper. Headed by Madeira,--who kept close to
him a man named Salver, to whom he constantly referred as "our
engineering friend from Joplin,"--the party stamped into the hotel
dining-room. And though various members of the party were heavily
booted, big, brawny, and in other ways cut out as assertive, it was much
as though they were not there, so completely did Madeira fill the room.
In the hotel office, after the supper had been disposed of, though every
man had a cigar or a pipe in his mouth, it seemed as though Madeira were
really doing all the smoking, so insistently did the smoke wreaths twist
about his big face, as the others edged nearer him and closed in upon
him. On the outside, on the way back up town, the street seemed full of
Madeira. Even when some few of the satellites broke away from him and
scattered into other parts of the town, at the livery stable, the drug
store, the Grange, talking a little dubiously, the impression was
definite that they were only meteoric scraps, cast-off clinkers that
could not stand the fire and the fizz and the whirl in Madeira's orbit.

The superintendent of the Tigmore County schools, a long, lean man with
a trick of covert sarcasm, happened to be in Canaan that day, and he
cracked a joke about Madeira's "galley-gang," as the bevy of men swept
past him on their way back to the bank. In Canaan almost any joke had a
fair chance to become classic through immediate and long-drawn
repetition, and the superintendent's joke was soon going up and down the
street as majestically as though swathed in a Roman toga. By seven
o'clock the joke had come on to Madeira's ears. At eight o'clock the
superintendent was one of seven men who sat in conference with Madeira