that I wanted to go--and don't
you say anything about this thing, Mr. Barslow; but somethin' seemed to
pull the nigh line an' turn me toward Main Street; an' fust thing I
knew, I was a-drivin' hell-bent for O'Brien's place! Somethin' was
a-whisperin' to me, 'Go down an' see the boys, an' show 'em that yeh can
drink 'r let it alone, jest as yeh see fit!' And the thought come over
me o' Josie a-standin' there at the gate waitin' f'r me, an' I set my
teeth, an' jerked the hosses' heads around, an' like to upset the buggy
a-turnin'. 'You look pale, pa,' says Josie. 'Maybe we'd better not go.'
'No,' says I, 'I'm all right.' But what ... gits me ... is thinkin'
that, if I'll be hauled around like that when I'm two miles away, how
long would I last ... if onst I was to git right down in the midst of
it!"

I could not endure the subject any longer; it was so unutterably fearful
to see him making this despairing struggle against the foe so strongly
lodged within his citadel. I talked to him of old times and places known
to us both, and incidentally called to his mind instances of the
recovery of men afflicted as he was. Soon Josie came after him, and Jim
dropped in, as he was quite in the habit of doing, making one of those
casual and informal little companies which constituted a most
distinctive feature of life in our compact little Belgravia.

Josie insisted that life in the cow country was what she had been
longing for. She had never shot any one, and had never painted a cowboy,
an Indian, or a coyote--things she had always longed to do.

"You must take me out there, pa," said she. "It's the only way to
utilize the capital we've foolishly tied up in the department of the
fine arts!"

"I reckon we'll hev to do it, then, little gal," said Bill.

"My mind," said Jim, "is divided between your place up on the headwaters
of Bitter Creek and Paris. Paris seems to promise pretty well, when this
fitful fever of business is over and we've cleaned up the mill run."

Art, he went on, seemed to be a career for which he was really fitted.
In the foreground, as a cowboy, or in the middle distance, in his
proper person as a tenderfoot, it seemed as if there was a vocation for
him. Josie made no reply to this, and Jim went away downcast.

The Addison-Giddings wedding drew on out of the future, and seemed to
loom portentously like doom for the devoted Clifford. It may have
suggested itself to the reader that Mr. Giddings was an abnorma