ven't you and I reason to be charitable? There! there! let us forget
the land and the money. Roscoe, I should like to meet this Miss Colton.
She must be a brave girl."

"She is brave enough."

"I suppose poor Mr. Carver is in disgrace. Perhaps it was not his fault
altogether."

This was a trifle too much. I refused to be charitable to Victor.

I heard from him, or of him, next day. I met Captain Jed Dean at the
bank, where I had called to see Taylor and inquire concerning how he
and Nellie got home from the festival. They had had a damp, though safe,
journey, I learned, and the Methodist ladies had cleared seventy-four
dollars and eighty-five cents from the entertainment.

Captain Jed entered the door as I left the cashier's gate.

"Ship ahoy, Ros!" hailed the captain, genially. "Make port safe and
sound after the flood? I'd have swapped my horse and buggy for Noah's
Ark that night and wouldn't have asked any boot neither. Did you see
Mullet's bridge? Elnathan says he cal'lates he's got willow kindlin'
enough to last him all summer. Ready split too--the lightnin' attended
to that. Lute Rogers don't talk about nothin' else. I cal'late he wishes
lightnin' would strike your woodpile; then he'd be saved consider'ble
labor, hey?"

He laughed and I laughed with him.

"I understood Princess Colton was out in the wust of it," went on
Captain Jed. "Did you hear how her horse ran away?"

"Yes," I answered, shortly; "I heard about it."

"Never stopped till it got half way to West Bayport. The coachman
hangin' onto the reins and swearin' at the top of his lungs all the
time. 'Bije Ellis, who lives up that way, says the road smells like a
match factory even yet--so much brimstone in the air. The girl got
home somehow or other, they tell me. I cal'late her fine duds got their
never-get-over. Nellie says the hat she was wearin' come from Paris, or
some such foreign place. Well, the rain falls on the just and unjust,
so scriptur tells us, and it's true enough. Only the unjust in this case
can afford new hats better'n the just, a consider'ble sight. Denboro's
lost a promisin' new citizen; did you know it?"

"Whom do you mean?"

"Hadn't you heard? That young Carver feller shook the dust--the mud, I
mean--of our roads off his shoes this mornin'. He went away on the up
train."

Here was news. "The up train?" I repeated. "You mean he has gone for
good?"

"I should call it for good, for our good, anyhow. Yes, he's gone. Wen