n for a few moments. The two young men then
talked with one another as strangers do, of the current topics of the
day and the country, speaking mostly of the Shawnee danger--the one
subject then most earnestly and universally discussed throughout the
wilderness. The nearest approach to a personal tone was in William
Pressley's formal expression of thanks. Paul Colbert put these aside as
formally as they were offered, and in a moment more he got up to take
leave. Yet in that brief space the two men had begun to dislike each
other.

This was natural enough on the part of William Pressley. It is indeed
the first instinct of his kind toward any equal or superior. When a
man's or a woman's vanity is so great that it instinctively and
instantly levies on all within reach--demanding incense--nothing can be
so dislikeful as a bearing which refuses to swing the censer. From its
very nature it must instantly resent any such conscious or unconscious
claim to equality, to say nothing of superiority. Those so afflicted
must of necessity like only their inferiors and must have only inferiors
for friends, if they have any friends at all. So that this is maybe the
real reason why many reasonably good and perfectly sincere men and
women go almost friendless through useful and blameless lives. And this
was William Pressley's natural feeling toward Paul Colbert. The honest,
sincere young lawyer could have forgiven the honest, sincere young
doctor almost any real sin or weakness and have liked him well enough;
but he could not forgive the polite indifference of his manner toward
himself, or his looking over his head at Ruth, or turning from him to
speak to David. Least of all could he forgive him for being at that
moment the most conspicuous figure in the whole region, on account of
his single-handed struggle with the mysterious disease, which, defying
the other doctors, had been devastating the new settlements of the
wilderness. Nor could the difference in their aims affect this feeling
in the least. To a nature like William Pressley's, anything won by
another is something taken from himself. Yet the dislike for Paul
Colbert, which thus hardened within him, had no taint of jealousy in the
ordinary sense of that term. He did not think of Ruth at all in the
matter. It did not occur to him to associate her with this stranger, or
with any one but himself. It was in keeping with his character for him
to be slower than a less vain man to suspec