--lying where it had dropped near his side. A painter might
have seen in the pose a picture of the felled and beaten fighter; the
burden-bearer chafing under enforced idleness and the imprisonment of an
irritable convalescence.

"Yes, come in, or go out, whoever you are--and _shut the door_!" There
was no hospitality in the irascible greeting of the manor's lord, and
the face he half-turned to inspect the stranger was devoid of welcome.
It was mirthless from its deep eyes to the lips and chin that were
hidden in a patriarchal spread of beard.

Mary for some reason flushed deeply as she stood aside and timidly
smiled as though in amends of courtesy.

The young man went straight to the stove and began loosening the collar
of his heavy mackinaw. For a moment, without rising or taking any notice
beyond a curt nod, old Tom Burton bent upon him eyes of incurious
gravity.

"I take it you are Thomas S. Burton," began the young stranger. "My
name's Edwardes and I have a shack back in the hills. The snowstorm has
delayed me and I must throw myself on your hospitality for the night."

"Yes." Thomas Burton spoke slowly and dully, and this, too, was a result
of his illness, for in past days his voice had rung stentorian above the
blows of axes in the timber. "Yes, I've heard of you. You're the
millionaire hobo. When a man's got plenty of money and chooses to live
alone in a country that 'most everybody else is leavin', he's tolerable
apt to be heard of."

The comment was not softened with the modification of banter, but rasped
with the twang of suspicion as though the speaker expected to give
offense--and did not care. Young Edwardes received it with a peal of
laughter so infectious that the man in the chair looked up, surprised.

"So that's how they figure me out, is it?" inquired the traveler. "I
suppose though," he added as if in answer to his own question, "no man
knows what portrait public opinion paints of him. At all events I'm a
harmless hobo and quite willing to pay when I put my fellow-man to
inconvenience. I live in the mountains by the sentence of my doctors."

"Lunger, eh?" Burton nodded his head comprehensively, but quite without
sympathy; and the guest bowed his assent.

"Some folks turns lungers away," commented the host reflectively, "but
that's only in the summertime when the vacation boarders kicks on 'em.
As for me, I don't take in boarders summer _nor_ winter, but when the
snow drives a man in I don't