Priest woke with the first
premonitory thud from the kitchen, and he was up and dressed in his
white linens and out upon the wide front porch while the summer day was
young and unblemished. The sun was not up good yet. It made a red glow,
like a barn afire, through the treetops looking eastward. Lie-abed
blackbirds were still talking over family matters in the maples that
clustered round the house, and in the back yard Judge Priest's big red
rooster hoarsely circulated gossip in regard to a certain little brown
hen, first crowing out the news loudly and then listening, with his head
on one side, while the rooster in the next yard took it up and repeated
it to a rooster living farther down the road, as is the custom among
male scandalizers the world over. Upon the lawn the little gossamer
hammocks that the grass spiders had seamed together overnight were
spangled with dew, so that each out-thrown thread was a glittering
rosary and the center of each web a silken, cushioned jewel casket.
Likewise each web was outlined in white mist, for the cottonwood trees
were shedding down their podded product so thickly that across open
spaces the slanting lines of the drifting fiber looked like snow. It
would be hot enough after a while, but now the whole world was sweet and
fresh and washed clean.

It impressed Judge Priest so. He lowered his bulk into a rustic chair
made of hickory withes that gave to his weight, and put his thoughts
upon breakfast and the goodness of the day; but presently, as he sat
there, he saw something that set a frown between his faded blue eyes.

He saw, coming down Clay Street, upon the opposite side, an old man--a
very feeble old man--who was tall and thin and dressed in somber black.
The man was lame--he dragged one leg along with the hitching gait of the
paralytic. Traveling with painful slowness, he came on until he reached
the corner above. Then automatically he turned at right angles and left
the narrow wooden sidewalk and crossed the dusty road. He passed Judge
Priest's, looking neither to the right nor the left, and so kept on
until he reached the corner below. Still following an invisible path in
the deep-furrowed dust, he crossed again to the other side. Just as he
got there his halt leg seemed to give out altogether and for a minute or
two he stood holding himself up by a fumbling grip upon the slats of a
tree box before he went laboriously on, a figure of pain and weakness in
the early sunshi