's work!"

CHAPTER IV.

The Choice

Luck had come at last to the Ferris farm. Link's cash went into
improvements on the place, instead of going into the deteriorating of
his inner man. And he worked the better. A sulky man is ever prone to
be an inefficient man. And Link no longer sulked.

All this-combined with a wholesale boom in local agriculture, and
especially in truck gardening--had wrought wonders in Link's farm and
in Link's bank account. Within three years of Ferris's meeting with
Chum the place's last mortgage was wiped out and a score of needed
repairs and improvements were installed. Also the man had a small but
steadily growing sum to his credit in a Paterson savings bank.

Life on the farm was mighty pleasant, nowadays. Work was hard, of
course, but it was bringing results that made it more than worth while.
Ferris and his dog were living on the fat of the land. And they were
happy.

Then came the interruption that had been inevitable from the very first.

A taciturn and eternally dead-broke man, in a rural region, need not
fear intrusion on his privacy. Convivial folk make detours round him,
as if he were a mud puddle. Thriftier and more respectable neighbors
eye him askance or eye him not at all.

But when a meed of permanent success comes to such a man he need no
longer be lonely unless he so wills. Which is not cynicism, but common
sense. The convivial element will still fight shy of him. But he is
welcomed into the circle of the respectable.

So it was with Link Ferris. Of old he had been known as a shiftless and
harddrinking mountaineer with a sour farm that was plastered with
mortgages. Now, he had cleared off his mortgages and had cleaned up his
farm; and he and his home exuded an increasing prosperity.

People, meeting him in the nearby village of Hampton or at church,
began to treat him with a consideration that the long-aloof farmer
found bewildering.

Yet he liked it rather than not; being at heart a gregarious soul. And
with gruff friendliness he met the advances of well-to-do neighbors who
in old days had scarce favored him with a nod.

The gradual change from the isolated life of former years did not make
any sort of a hit with Chum. The collie had been well content to wander
through the day's work at his master's heels; to bring in the sheep and
the cattle from pasture; to guard the farm from intruders--human or
otherwise.

In the evenings it had been sweet to lounge a