ask him why you are driving Tom Jocelyn off of his old land!"

"My father died three years ago," said Gordon, between his set teeth.
"What do you mean?"

Jocelyn looked at him blankly.

"What do you mean?" repeated Gordon, with narrowing eyes.

Jocelyn stood quite still. Presently he looked down at the fish on the
ground and moved it with his foot. Then Gordon asked him for the third
time what he meant, and Jocelyn, raising his eyes, answered him: "With
the dead all quarrels die."

"That is not enough!" said Gordon, harshly. "Do you believe my father
wronged you?"

"He's dead," said Jocelyn, as though speaking to himself.

Presently he picked up the fish and walked towards his house, gray head
bent between his shoulders.

For a moment Gordon hesitated, then he threw his gun smartly over his
shoulder and motioned his dogs to heel. But his step had lost something
of its elasticity, and he climbed the hill slowly, following with
troubled eyes his own shadow, which led him on over the dead grass.

The edge of the woods was warm in the sunshine. Faint perfumes of the
vanished summer lingered in fern and bramble.

He did not enter the woods. There was a fallen log, rotten and fragrant,
half buried in the briers, and on it he found a seat, calling his dogs
to his feet.

In the silence of morning he could hear the pine-borers at work in the
log he was sitting on, scra-ape! scra-ape! scr-r-rape! deep in the soft,
dry pulp under the bark. There were no insects abroad except the
white-faced pine hornets, crawling stiffly across the moss. He noticed
no birds, either, at first, until, glancing up, he saw a great drab
butcher-bird staring at him from a dead pine.

At first that inert oppression which always came when the memory of his
father returned to him touched his fine lips with a gravity too deep for
his years. No man had ever said that his father had dealt unfairly with
men, yet for years now his son had accumulated impressions, vague and
indefinable at first, but clearer as he grew older, and the impressions
had already left the faintest tracery of a line between his eyebrows. He
had known his father as a hard man; he knew that the world had found him
hard and shrewd. And now, as he grew older and understood what the
tribute of honest men was worth, even to the dead, he waited to hear one
word. But he never heard it. He had heard other things, however, but
always veiled, like the menacing outbreak of old man Jo