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me mine, an Tom, Dick, an' Harry their'n, this town never will git cleaned up."

Abner was amazed at such a view. He always had felt so profoundly the innocence of Nessie's yieldings to him that Willie's view dumbfounded him.

"By God!" he cried in an ill-coördinated effort to refute, "if—if you think that—you're no friend o' mine!"

"Why, Ab, you know it ain't right. Now, I leave it to you, is it?"

"All I got to say is, it looks damn funny to me! That's all I got to say!" He turned and began smashing his way through the bushes.

Mr. Purvis, peace-loving by nature, hung on to the teamster's flank.

"Now, look here, don't git mad at me. But you know it ain't right. And besides that, Perry Northcutt's kinder talkin' agin' you, too. Says the boys would make a good job if they chased you out, too."

"By God, try it, if you feel like it!"

"Hell, I'm jess tellin' you. I told 'em if you start chasin' the men out for that, they'd haff to move 'em in gangs, an' the last man would haff to march hisse'f off."

But Abner was not conciliated by this cynicism. He tramped on off through the woods, determined to marry Nessie Sutton out of hand, and to hell with what anybody thought about it. He wouldn't let any spike-headed bank cashier tell him what he could do or where he could stay. Here his soliloquy fizzled out as he entered the purlieus of the villages again.

By this time the sun was down. Against the flare of the sunset the woods which Abner had just left were picked out in a gamut of textures from the lace of willows through the progressively darker spotulations of sycamore, elms, maples, to the solid blackness of cedars and pines.

Unmindful of all these traceries against the scarlet west, Abner hurried into the silent village streets which were de-