sacred honor
in the hands of his seconds--a humiliating recollection of the sudden
revulsion of the aspect of all things; the criminal sense of haste with
which he was hurried away after that first straight shot; the agitation,
nay, the fright of his seconds; their eagerness to be swiftly rid of
him, their insistence that he should go away for a time, get out of the
country, out of the embarrassing purview of the law, which was prone to
regard the matter as he himself saw it now, and which had an ugly trick
of calling things by their right names in the sincere phraseology of an
indictment. And thus it was that he was here, remote from all the usual
lines of flight, with his affectation of being a possible purchaser for
the old hotel, far from the railroad, the telegraph, even the postal
service. Some time--soon, indeed, it might be, when the first flush
of excitement and indignation should be overpast, and the law, like a
barking dog that will not bite, should have noisily exhausted the gamut
of its devoirs--he would go back and live according to his habit in his
wonted place, as did other men whom he had known to be "called out," and
who had survived their opponents. Meantime he heard the ash crumble; he
saw the lighted room wane from glancing yellow to a dull steady red,
and so to dusky brown; he marked the wind rise, and die away, and come
again, banging the doors of the empty rooms, and setting timbers all
strangely to creaking as under sudden trampling feet; then lift into the
air with a rustling sound like the stir of garments and the flutter of
wings, calling out weirdly in the great voids of the upper atmosphere.

He had welcomed the sense of fatigue earlier in the evening, for it
promised sleep. Now it had slipped away from him. He was strong and
young, and the burning sensation that the frosty air had left on his
face was the only token of the long journey. It seemed as if he
would never sleep again as he lay on the lounge watching the gray ash
gradually overgrow the embers, till presently only a vague dull glow
gave intimation of the position of the hearth in the room. And then,
bereft of this dim sense of companionship, he stared wide-eyed in the
darkness, feeling the only creature alive and awake in all the world.
No; the fox was suddenly barking within the quadrangle--a strangely wild
and alien tone. And presently he heard the animal trot past his door
on the piazza, the cushioned footfalls like those of a