cupation that still marked his countenance.

"He's a quitter," pondered the Colonel. "I reckon he ain't playin'
lamb so's to tole me on. He's growed soft--that's what he's done."

Ward went to sleep that night planning retaliation.

Sproul stayed awake when the house was quiet, still pondering.

IV

During the next few days, as one treads farther and farther out upon
thin ice to test it, the Colonel craftily set about regaining,
inch by inch, his lost throne as tyrant. Occasionally he checked
himself in some alarm, to wonder what meant that ridging of the
Cap'n's jaw-muscles, and whether he really heard the seaman's teeth
gritting. Once, when he recoiled before an unusually demoniac glare
from Sproul, the latter whined, after a violent inward struggle:

"It beats all how my rheumaticks has been talkin' up lately. I don't
seem to have no ginger nor spirit left in me. I reckon I got away
from the sea jest in time. I wouldn't even dare to order a nigger
to swab decks, the way I'm feelin' now."

"You've allus made a good deal of talk about how many men you've
handled in your day," said the Colonel, tucking a thumb under his
suspender and leaning back with supercilious cock of his gray
eyebrows. "It's bein' hinted round town here more or less that you're
northin' but bluff. I don't realize, come to think it over, how I
ever come to let you git such a holt in my fam'ly. I--"

The two were sitting, as was their custom in those days of the
Colonel's espionage, under the big maple in the yard. A man who was
passing in the highway paused and leaned on the fence.

"Can one of you gents tell me," he asked, "where such a lady as Miss
Phar"--he consulted a folded paper that he held in his
hand--"Pharleena Pike lives about here?"

He was an elderly man with a swollen nose, striated with purple veins.
Under his arm he carried a bundle done up in meat-paper.

There was a queer glint of excitement in the eyes of the Cap'n. But
he did not speak. He referred the matter to Ward with a jab of his
thumb.

"What do you want to know where Miss Pike lives for?" demanded the
Colonel, looking the stranger over with great disfavor.

"None of your business," replied the man of the swollen nose,
promptly. "I've asked a gent's question of one I took to be a gent,
and I'd like a gent's reply."

"You see," said Cap'n Sproul to the stranger, with a confidential
air, as though he were proposing to impart the secret of the Colonel'