wife in the corner, rocking the
cradle with one foot while she turned a hoe-cake baking on the hearth
with a dextrous flip of a knife, and feeling secure in his deafness,
cast a witty fling at his fastidious apparel. With that frequent yet
unexplained phenomenon of acoustics, her voice was so strung that its
vibrations reached his numb perceptions as duly as if intended for his
ears. He made no sign, in his pride and politeness, both indigenous. But
he said to himself, "I don't laugh at her gown,--it is what she likes
and what she is accustomed to wear. And why can't she let me dress in
peace as I was early trained to do? God knows I feel myself better than
nobody."

And he was sensible of his age, his infirmity, his isolation, and his
jauntiness was eclipsed.

Thus he entered the race with a handicap, and John Ronackstone would
hear none of his reasons with grace. He could not and he would not
consent to the nomination of an ambassador in the stead of Emsden, who
had volunteered for the service, which was the more appropriate since it
was he who had shot the wolf and brought the stampede and its attendant
difficulties upon the herders of the Keowee River, and this threat of
retaliation upon the Blue Lick Stationers. If there were danger at hand,
let a volunteer encounter it! In vain Mivane argued that there was
danger to no one else. John Ronackstone, who found an added liberty of
disputation in the emphasis imposed by the necessity of roaring out his
immutable opinions in an exceeding loud voice, retorted that so far as
he was informed the "cow-drivers" on the Keowee were not certain who it
was that had committed this atrocity, unless perhaps their messenger
during his sojourn at Blue Lick Station had learned the name from "X."
But this uncertainty, Mivane argued, was the very point of difficulty.
It was the maddest folly to dispatch to angry men, smarting under a
grievous injury, messages of taunt and defiance by the one person who in
their opinion, perhaps, had carelessly or willfully wrought this wrong.
His life would pay the forfeit of the folly of his fellow-stationers.

Mivane noted suddenly that the woman rocking the cradle was laughing
with an ostentatious affectation of covert slyness, and a responsive
twinkle gleamed in the eyes of John Ronackstone. As he caught the grave
and surprised glance of his visitor he made a point of dropping the air
of a comment aside, which he, as well as she, had insistently br