one would say.

When he was not galloping Saladin afar in the country roads to the
landward side of Paradise, Tom Gordon was idling purposefully in the
Lebanon forests, with the fowling-piece under his arm and Japheth
Pettigrass's dog trotting soberly at heel, as care-free, to all
appearances, as a school-boy home for a holiday.

The dog, a mongrel, liver-spotted cur with hound's ears, chose to be of
this companionship, and he was always waiting at the orchard gate when
Tom fared forth. For the unsympathetic analyst of dog motives there will
be sufficient reason in expectation, since Tom never failed to share his
noon-time snack of bread and meat with Caesar. Yet Deer Trace set a good
table, and there were bones with meat on them to be had without
following a gunsman who never shot anything, miles on end on the
mountain side.

Then there were children,--a brood of dusty-haired, barelegged shynesses
at a mountaineer's cabin in a cove far beyond the rock of the shadowing
cedars, where Tom sometimes stopped to beg a drink of water from the
cold spring under the dooryard oaks. They were not afraid of the
strong-limbed, duck-clad stranger, whose manner was the manner of the
town folk, but whose speech was the gentle drawl of the mountain
motherland. Once he had eaten with them in the single room of the
tumble-down cabin; and again he had made a grape-vine swing for the
boys, and had ridden the littlest girl on his shoulder up to the
steep-pitched corn patch where her father was plowing. We may bear this
in mind, since it has been said that there is hope still for the man of
whom children and dogs have no fear.

In these forest-roaming weeks, business, or the carking thought of it,
seemed furthest from him; it is within belief that he heard the news of
the rapidly succeeding tragedies at Gordonia only through the
dinner-table monologues of his father, since his wanderings never by any
chance took him within eye-or ear-shot of them.

Caleb's ailment based itself chiefly on broken habit and the lack of
something to do, and in a manner the trouble at Gordonia was a tonic.
What a man beloved of his kind, and loving it, could do toward damping
the fierce fires of passion and hatred and lawlessness alight at the
lower end of Paradise, he was doing daily, going where the armed guards
and the sheriff's deputies dared not go, and striving manfully to do his
duty as he saw it.

Tom was always a silent listener at the dinner-tabl