PTER II

A DRY-SALT MAN

Joe was afoot early. His mother came to the place in the fence where the
gate once stood to give him a last word of comfort, and to bewail again
her selfishness in sending him away to serve as bondboy under the hard
hand of Isom Chase. Joe cheered her with hopeful pictures of the future,
when the old home should be redeemed and the long-dwelling shadow of
their debt to Isom cleared away and paid. From the rise in the road
which gave him the last sight of the house Joe looked back and saw her
with her head bowed to the topmost rail of the fence, a figure of
dejection and woe in the security which she had purchased for herself at
such a heavy price.

Although Joe moved briskly along his way, his feet as light as if they
carried him to some destination of certain felicity, there was a cloud
upon his heart. This arrangement which his mother had made in an hour of
panic had disordered his plans and troubled the bright waters of his
dreams. Plans and dreams were all his riches. They were the sole
patrimony of value handed down from Peter Newbolt, the Kentucky
gentleman, who had married below his state and carried his young
mountain wife away to the Missouri woods to escape the censure of family
and criticism of friends.

That was the only legacy, indeed, that Joe was conscious of, but
everybody else was aware that old Peter had left him something even more
dangerous than dreams. That was nothing less than a bridling,
high-minded, hot-blooded pride--a thing laughable, the neighbors said,
in one so bitterly and hopelessly poor.

"The pore folks," the neighbors called the Newbolts in speaking of them
one to another, for in that community of fairly prosperous people there
was none so poor as they. The neighbors had magnified their misfortune
into a reproach, and the "pore folks" was a term in which they found
much to compensate their small souls for the slights which old Peter, in
his conscious superiority, unwittingly put upon them.

To the end of his days Peter never had been wise enough to forget that
nature had endowed him, in many ways, above the level of the world to
which Fate had chained his feet, and his neighbors never had been kind
enough to forget that he was poor.

Even after Peter was dead Joe suffered for the family pride. He was
still spoken of, far and near in that community, as the "pore folks's
boy." Those who could not rise to his lofty level despised him because
he respecte