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an' water before . . ." Here he blinked the moisture out of his eyes and shouted across the cab to the engineer, "Partner, I wish you'd kinder slow down about even with old Squire Meredith's place. I want to git off there."

The greasy one gave a wooden nod.

Some hour later the teamster jumped from the cab and landed with a jar on some freshly turned earth alongside the track. He waited till the train had gone and then set out across the field in the direction of the Meredith home. As he walked he could see the gray gable of the old house and the slender column of a pear tree above the shoulder of the hill. In the yellowing sunshine this formed a picture, but its line and colour were lost on Abner. To him it was simply Squire Meredith's old house which he could see from the foot of the pasture hill, and he veered off at an angle toward the highway.

Once Abner placed himself on the familiar road a dozen memories of Nessie Sutton arose in him and filled his heart with a sharp desire to see her again, and with an anxiety about her welfare. The Meredith house recalled the time he had carried Tug Beavers's note to Mary Lou, and the row the old justice had raised. He remembered how he had stayed all night with the Squire and had cried for homesickness. He recollected talking to Nessie in the Lanesburg courthouse yard—how beautiful and unattainable she had looked standing there silently on the lawn. . . .

Now he was passing the hill where the mob had lynched Peck Bradley. He would have seen the tragedy had it not been for Nessie's surrender to him. The mere thought of this moved Abner to an exquisite tenderness and desire for the girl.

Suddenly, he decided he would marry her. He would rent a car at the Irontown garage, go to Lanesburg with Nessie, marry her, and end this gossip at a stroke.

He was striding down the hill now, filled with this warm impulse composed half of generosity and tenderness and half of desire. He felt it was distinctly a generous thing to do, to