to advise
me about gitting married--and he's still a cripple. There was no man
ever tried to recite love poetry to me. You take fair warnin'."

"Then you ain't willin' to listen to my experience, considerin' that
I've been a worse hard-shell than you ever was in marriage matters,
and now see the errors of my ways?" The Cap'n was blinking up
wistfully.

"It means that I take ye by your heels and snap your head off," rasped
Ward, tucking his sleeves away from his corded wrists. "You ain't
got your club with you this time."

The Cap'n sighed resignedly.

"Now," went on the Colonel, with the vigorous decision of a man who
feels that he has got the ascendency, "you talk about something that
amounts to something. That stumpage on number eight is mostly cedar
and hackmatack, and I've got an offer from the folks that want
sleepers for the railroad extension."

He went on with facts and figures, but the Cap'n listened with only
languid interest. He kept sighing and wrinkling his brows, as though
in deep rumination on a matter far removed from the stumpage question.
When the agreement of sale was laid before him he signed with a
blunted lead-pencil, still in his trance.

"Northin' but a cross-cut saw with two axe-handles for legs," he said
to himself, his eyes on the Colonel's back as that individual stamped
wrathfully away. "Teeth and edge are hard as iron! It's no good to
talk mattermony to him. Prob'ly it wouldn't do no good for me to talk
mattermony to Phar--Phar--to t'other one. She couldn't ask him to
go git a minister. 'Tain't right to put that much onto a woman's
shoulders. The trouble with him is that he's too sure of wimmen. Had
his sister under his thumb all them years, and thought less and less
of her for stayin' there. He's too sure of t'other. Thinks nobody
else wants her. Thinks all he's got to do is step round and git her
some day. Ain't got no high idee of wimmen like I have. Thinks they
ought to wait patient as a tree in a wood-lot. Has had things too
much his own way, I say. Hain't never had his lesson. Thinks nobody
else don't want her, hey? And she can wait his motions! He needs his
lesson. Lemme see!"

With his knurly forefinger at his puckered forehead he sat and
pondered.

He was very silent at supper.

The Colonel, still exulting in his apparent victory, said many
sneering and savage things, and clattered his knife truculently on
his plate. Sproul merely looked at him with that wistful
preoc