ted other reasons, and despised him accordingly.

Their scorn of his "softness," however, failed to extend to the man
himself. Different, they found him, reserved, a little cold, unless they
happened to be in trouble; but never alien. For one thing, he had
inherited from his father a gift that made "the French doctor" long
remembered in that horse-raising community. It was an understanding of
horses, indeed of all brute creatures, that amounted almost to wizardry.
There was never a colt so unmanageable that he could not bring it to
terms, without the aid of either whip or spur; never an equine ailment
too subtle for him to discover and alleviate. At all hours of the day or
night owners of sick beasts sent for the young rector as they had sent
for his father, confident of willing assistance.

He had created his reputation by entering, against all protests, the
stall of a crazed stallion which had just mangled its groom. "I want to
look at his mouth," he explained. "Just as I thought! It's an ulcerated
tooth. Give me my lancet. No wonder the poor beast was vicious!"

Philip had made the discovery among animals made by his father among
men, that most wickedness may be traced to physical causes. He had also
been heard to say, not very originally, that horses needed more care
than people, because people had speech and religion to help them and
horses had neither; a saying which deeply endeared him to a community
that ranks its thoroughbreds with its wives.

Two other qualities of his offset, in the eyes of the neighborhood, the
matter of the flowers, the poetry-books, and the cooking. He had
courage, and he had a temper, both proved. A few years previously,
during the "tobacco-war" which upset the State, when the entire
countryside was terrified by the outrages of the Night-Riders who had
taken justice into their own hands, after the fashion of the moribund
Ku-Klux Klan, young Benoix alone, of all the pastors in his
neighborhood, did not hesitate to denounce from his pulpit Sunday after
Sunday the men who resorted to masked terrorism as sneaks, cowards, and
murderers. And this, despite the fact that the majority of his
congregation were in sympathy with the Night-Riders for the best of
reasons--kinship. Indeed, more than one man who listened to him with a
stolid face had worn the mask and wielded the whip and torch himself.
Benoix knew it; they knew that he did. They knew also that no possible
circumstance could persuade