own. He said Redruth was a fine young man, but when you
kicked him on the pocket all you could hear jingle was a cuff-fastener
and a bunch of keys. He was engaged to this young lady--Miss
Alice--something was her name; I've forgot. This man said she was the
kind of girl you like to have reach across you in a car to pay the fare.
Well, there come to the town a young chap all affluent and easy, and
fixed up with buggies and mining stock and leisure time. Although she
was a staked claim, Miss Alice and the new entry seemed to strike a
mutual kind of a clip. They had calls and coincidences of going to the
post office and such things as sometimes make a girl send back the
engagement ring and other presents--'a rift within the loot [86],' the
poetry man calls it.

[FOOTNOTE 86: rift . . . loot--Tennyson, _Idylls of the King:
Merlin and Vivien_:
"It is the little rift within the lute
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all."]

"One day folks seen Redruth and Miss Alice standing talking at the
gate. Then he lifts his hat and walks away, and that was the last
anybody in that town seen of him, as far as this man knew."

"What about the young lady?" asked the young man who had an Agency.

"Never heard," answered Bildad. "Right there is where my lode of
information turns to an old spavined crowbait [87], and folds its
wings, for I've pumped it dry."

[FOOTNOTE 87: spavined crowbait--a lame, emaciated horse (from
spavin, an inflammation of the tarsal or ankle
joint of a horse, causing lameness, and an
appearance that causes carrion birds to think a
meal is in the offing)]

"A very sad--" began Judge Menefee, but his remark was curtailed by a
higher authority.

"What a charming story!" said the lady passenger, in flute-like tones.

A little silence followed, except for the wind and the crackling of
the fire.

The men were seated upon the floor, having slightly mitigated its
inhospitable surface with wraps and stray pieces of boards. The man
who was placing Little Goliath windmills arose and walked about to
ease his cramped muscles.

Suddenly a triumphant shout came from him. He hurried back from a
dusky corner of the room, bearing aloft something in his hand. It was
an apple--a large, red-mottled, firm pippin, pleasing