. There, you see, Mr. Fair, the road skirts the creek
westward and then northwestward again, leaving Rosemont a mile to the
northeast. See that house, Barb, about half a mile beyond the railroad?
There's where the man found his plumbago." The speaker laughed and told
the story. The discoverer had stolen off by night, got an expert to come
and examine it, and would tell the result only to one friend, and in a
whisper. "'You haven't got much plumbago,' the expert had said, 'but
you've got dead oodles of silica.' You know, Barb, silica's nothing but
flint, ha-ha!"

Fair smiled. In his fortnight's travel through the New Dixie plumbago
was the only mineral on which he had not heard the story based.

A military horseman overtook the carriage and slackened to a fox-trot at
Garnet's side. "Captain Champion, let me make you acquainted with Mr.
Fair. Mr. Fair and his father have put money into our New Dixie, and
he's just going around to see where he can put in more. I tell him he
can't go amiss. All we want in Dixie is capital."

"Mr. Fair doesn't think so," said Barbara, with great sweetness.

"Ah! I merely asked whether capital doesn't seek its own level. Mustn't
its absence be always because of some deeper necessity?"

Champion stood on his guard. "Why, I don't know why capital shouldn't be
the fundamental need, seh, of a country that's been impoverished by a
great waugh!"

Barbara exulted, but Garnet was for peace. "I suppose you'll find Suez
swarming with men, women, and horses."

"Yes," said Champion--Fair was speaking to Barbara--"to say nothing of
yahoos, centaurs, and niggehs." The Major's abundant laugh flattered
him; he promised to join the party at luncheon, lifted his plumed shako,
and galloped away. Garnet drove into the edge of the town at a trot.

"Here's where the reservoir's to be," he said, and spun down the slope
into the shaded avenue, and so to the town's centre.

"Laws-a-me! Miss Barb," whispered Johanna, "but dis-yeh town is change'!
New hotel! brick! th'ee sto'ies high!" Barbara touched her for silence.

"But look at de new sto'es!" murmured the girl. Negroes--the men in
dirty dusters, the women in smart calicoes, girls in dowdy muslins and
boy's hats--and mountain whites, coatless men, shoeless women--hung
about the counters dawdling away their small change.

"Colored and white treated precisely alike, you notice," said Garnet,
and Barbara suppressed a faint grunt from Johanna.

Trade had s