mmon; ways as is easy, and ways as is oneasy. Bear up, and keep
dark." With this Delphic utterance he put his finger to his lips, and
vanished.

It was ten o'clock when he reached Four Forks. A few minutes later,
he stood on the threshold of that dwelling described by the Four Forks
"Sentinel" as "the palatial residence of John Ashe," and known to the
local satirist as the "ash-box." "Hevin' to lay by two hours, John," he
said to his prospective son-in-law, as he took his hand at the door,
"a few words of social converse, not on business, but strictly
private, seems to be about as nat'ral a thing as a man can do." This
introduction, evidently the result of some study, and plainly committed
to memory, seemed so satisfactory to Mr. McClosky, that he repeated
it again, after John Ashe had led him into his private office, where,
depositing his valise in the middle of the floor, and sitting down
before it, he began carefully to avoid the eye of his host. John Ashe, a
tall, dark, handsome Kentuckian, with whom even the trifles of life
were evidently full of serious import, waited with a kind of chivalrous
respect the further speech of his guest. Being utterly devoid of any
sense of the ridiculous, he always accepted Mr. McClosky as a grave
fact, singular only from his own want of experience of the class.

"Ores is running light now," said Mr. McClosky with easy indifference.

John Ashe returned that he had noticed the same fact in the receipts of
the mill at Four Forks.

Mr. McClosky rubbed his beard, and looked at his valise, as if for
sympathy and suggestion.

"You don't reckon on having any trouble with any of them chaps as you
cut out with Jinny?"

John Ashe, rather haughtily, had never thought of that. "I saw Rance
hanging round your house the other night, when I took your daughter
home; but he gave me a wide berth," he added carelessly.

"Surely," said Mr. McClosky, with a peculiar winking of the eye. After a
pause, he took a fresh departure from his valise.

"A few words, John, ez between man and man, ez between my daughter's
father and her husband who expects to be, is about the thing, I take it,
as is fair and square. I kem here to say them. They're about Jinny, my
gal."

Ashe's grave face brightened, to Mr. McClosky's evident discomposure.

"Maybe I should have said about her mother; but, the same bein' a
stranger to you, I says naterally, 'Jinny.'"

Ashe nodded courteously. Mr. McClosky, with his eyes