Easy's winking. This snapper of yours wouldn't be bad
eating. Might fetch five cents a pound in the market."

I was not exactly fond of Emilius, but I hated to hear him discussed as
edible pounds. Moving away a little, I began to stir lightly with my
twig the loose earth in his last excavation. Giant Bluff was no
favorite in our neighborhood, into which he had intruded, a stranger
from the wild west, a year or two before. His little habit of sitting
on his back steps, Sunday afternoons, with a rifle across his knees,
and shooting with accurate aim every cat and hen that trespassed on his
land was in itself enough to account for his unpopularity.

The shooting, however, except when a pet rooster or tabby was the
victim, thrilled the children on the hill with a delicious terror. Only
that morning I had seen Towhead, crouched behind a clump of syringas,
playing sharp-shooter.

"Here!" he was shouting to Rosycheeks, who was approaching very slowly,
like a fascinated bird. "Hurry up! You've got to come walking by and be
shot."

"I doesn't want to," sobbed poor little Rosycheeks, "but I's
tomin',--I's tomin'."

The glory of Giant Bluff, whose boasts were as prodigious as his
profession was mysterious, had recently, however, been tarnished by an
open discomfiture. One of our oldest and most respected citizens, a
Yankee in blood and bone, driver of a depot carriage, had incurred
Giant Bluff's deadly displeasure. And this was the way of it. In this
beginning of our sleepy summertide, when the campus was as empty of
life as a seigniorial park, when the citizens were able to use the
sidewalks and the shopkeepers dozed behind their counters, the New York
train dropped at our station a sharp-voiced young woman in a flamboyant
hat.

Uncle Abram, the only driver to persist in meeting trains through the
long vacation, watched from his carriage, with indifferent eyes, her
brisk approach.

"Is this a public vehicle?"

"Think likely."

"Do you know where Mr. Benjamin Bluff lives?"

"Maybe."

"Take me there."

On the way the fare, Giant Bluff's daughter by a former marriage,
questioned Uncle Abram as to her father's business and position in the
town, but she might as well have tried to wring information from
Emilius. Arrived at the house, she bade her driver inquire for her if
Mr. Bluff was at home, saying that otherwise she would not call.

Mrs. Bluff, whom Uncle Abram had never met before, answered the bell.

"Mr. Blu