satisfaction to you, I do," admitted the judge.

"You ought to." Mahaffy drew forward a chair. The judge filled his
glass. But Mr. Mahaffy's lean face, with its long jaws and high
cheek-bones, over which the sallow skin was tightly drawn, did not relax
in its forbidding expression, even when he had tossed off his first
glass.

"I love to see you in a perfectly natural attitude like that, Solomon,
with your arm crooked. What's the news from the landing?"

Mahaffy brought his fist down on the table.

"I heard the boat churning away round back of the bend, then I saw
the lights, and she tied up and they tossed off the freight. Then she
churned away again and her lights got back of the trees on the bank.
There was the lap of waves on the shore, and I was left with the
half-dozen miserable loafers who'd crawled out to see the boat come in.
That's the news six days a week!"

By the river had come the judge, tentatively hopeful, but at heart
expecting nothing, therefore immune to disappointment and equipped
for failure. By the river had come Mr. Mahaffy, as unfit as the judge
himself, and for the same reason, but sour and bitter with the world,
believing always in the possibility of some miracle of regeneration.

Pleasantville's weekly paper, The Genius of Liberty, had dwelt at length
upon those distinguished services judge Slocum Price had rendered the
nation in war and peace, the judge having graciously furnished an array
of facts otherwise difficult of access. That he was drunk at the time
had but added to the splendor of the narrative. He had placed his ripe
wisdom, the talents he had so assiduously cultivated, at the services of
his fellow citizens. He was prepared to represent them in any or all
the courts. But he had remained undisturbed in his condition of
preparedness; that erudite brain was unconcerned with any problem beyond
financing his thirst at the tavern, where presently ingenuity, though it
expressed itself with a silver tongue, failed him, and he realized that
the river's spent floods had left him stranded with those other odds and
ends of worthless drift that cumbered its sun-scorched mud banks.

Something of all this passed through his mind as he sat there sodden and
dreamy, with the one fierce need of his nature quieted for the moment.
He had been stranded before, many times, in those long years during
which he had moved steadily toward a diminishing heritage; indeed,
nothing that was evil could co