inspiration, "is popper goin' to
join in business with those surveyors,--a surveyin'?"

"No, child, what an idea! Run away there,--and mind!--don't bother your
father."

Nevertheless John Milton's inspiration had taken a new and
characteristic shape. All this, he reflected, had happened since the
surveyors came--since they had weakly displayed such a shameless and
unmanly interest in his sisters! It could have but one meaning. He hung
around the sitting-room and passages until he eventually encountered
Clementina, taller than ever, evidently wearing a guilty satisfaction
in her face, engrafted upon that habitual bearing of hers which he had
always recognized as belonging to a vague but objectionable race whose
members were individually known to him as "a proudy."

"Which of those two surveyor fellows is it, Clemmy?" he said with an
engaging smile, yet halting at a strategic distance.

"Is what?"

"Wot you're goin' to marry."

"Idiot!"

"That ain't tellin' which," responded the boy darkly.

Clementina swept by him into the sitting-room, where he heard her
declare that "really that boy was getting too low and vulgar
for anything." Yet it struck him, that being pressed for further
explanation, she did NOT specify why. This was "girls' meanness!"

Howbeit he lingered late in the road that evening, hearing his father
discuss with the search-party that had followed the banks of the creek,
vainly looking for further traces of the missing 'Lige, the possibility
of his being living or dead, of the body having been carried away by the
current to the bay or turning up later in some distant marsh when the
spring came with low water. One who had been to his cabin beside the
embarcadero reported that it was, as had been long suspected, barely
habitable, and contained neither books, papers, nor records which would
indicate his family or friends. It was a God-forsaken, dreary, worthless
place; he wondered how a white man could ever expect to make a living
there. If Elijah never turned up again it certainly would be a long time
before any squatter would think of taking possession of it. John Milton
knew instinctively, without looking up, that his father's eyes were
fixed upon him, and he felt himself constrained to appear to be
abstracted in gazing down the darkening road. Then he heard his father
say, with what he felt was an equal assumption of carelessness: "Yes, I
reckon I've got somewhere a bill of sale of that land that