, but who is? And suppose he does have a good time his own way?
We've got a right to--all of us. It's a free country."

Mr. Ward delivered this last sentiment with touching faith in its force
and freshness, and waved a plump hand of invitation toward the little
private office back of the main section of his store, where he had
developed his unfailing eloquence of speech upon subjects of public
interest, and liked best to practise it. But Neil, himself listened to
with growing deference by the groups that forgathered there, was not to
be lured to that sanctum to-day. Speaking hastily and vaguely of work to
be done, he escaped from his good friend and across the street to Judge
Saxon's office.

He climbed the stairs heavily, and did not linger before the door to
picture the sign changed to "Saxon, Burr, and Donovan," as he had done
more times than he cared to admit. The office was not a thing to be
proud of as a step up in life for him to-day; it was a place to be alone
in, as men feel alone and safe in the place that is their own because
they have worked there.

Showing this in every move, Neil locked the door, threw off his cap, and
dropped into the broken-springed chair at the desk that was nominally
Theodore Burr's, but really his. He groped mechanically for the handle
of the drawer where he usually rested his feet, found it hard to open,
gave up the attempt and, leaning back without its support, stared at Mr.
Burr's ornate, brass-mounted blotter with unseeing eyes.

Sitting there, he was no longer the boy who had the privilege of
intimate talk with prominent citizens like Mr. Ward and valued it; or
the boy who had laughed at his mother's anxiety so bravely. He was not
even the boy that he used to be, sullen, but rebellious, too. To-day for
the first time he was something worse, a defeated boy. The long minutes
dragged like hours, and he sat through them as he would have sat through
hours, silent and motionless, losing run of time and acknowledging
defeat.

For there was something that this boy wanted, and had always wanted, as
he could never want other things, even success or love, as a boy or a
man can want one thing only in one lifetime. It was a remote and
preposterous dream that he had, a dream that nobody else in Green River
was foolhardy enough to cherish long, but this boy belonged to the race
of poets and dreamers, the race that must sometimes dream true, because
it always dreams. His dream had taken dif