d stayed at home and helped nurse
what little they had, and gone into stock on the old man's bottom
farm, they might all have been well fixed. But the old man had to trust
everything to tenants and was cheated right and left."

"Harve never could have handled stock none," interposed the cattleman.
"He hadn't it in him to be sharp. Do you remember when he bought
Sander's mules for eight-year-olds, when everybody in town knew that
Sander's father-in-law give 'em to his wife for a wedding present
eighteen years before, an' they was full-grown mules then."

Everyone chuckled, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees with a spasm
of childish delight.

"Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore was
never fond of work," began the coal-and-lumber dealer. "I mind the last
time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to the barn
helpin' his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was
patchin' up the fence, Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, in
his ladylike voice: 'Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.'"

"That's Harve for you," approved the Grand Army man gleefully. "I kin
hear him howlin' yet when he was a big feller in long pants and his
mother used to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin' the
cows git foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin' 'em home from
pasture. He killed a cow of mine that-a-way onc't--a pure Jersey and the
best milker I had, an' the ole man had to put up for her. Harve, he was
watchin' the sun set acros't the marshes when the anamile got away; he
argued that sunset was oncommon fine."

"Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to
school," said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate,
judicial tone. "There was where he got his head full of traipsing to
Paris and all such folly. What Harve needed, of all people, was a course
in some first-class Kansas City business college."

The letters were swimming before Steavens's eyes. Was it possible that
these men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant nothing
to them? The very name of their town would have remained forever buried
in the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the world
in connection with Harvey Merrick's. He remembered what his master had
said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs
had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked
his pu