versed the streets of the lower village--long lanes of red
and blue and saffron-fronted saloon-hotels and rivermen's
lodging-houses--and reached the newer, huger mills down-river that the
girl regained in part her former vivacity.

Morrison had grown, inconceivably, in those elapsed years. A railroad
station and freight-yard occupied the ground which had been occupied by
the former mills; a single track road stretched arrow-straight into the
south to a junction with the trunk line, which swung westward twenty
odd miles below. And even the very atmosphere of that lower portion of
the town was different. The men still swarmed in on the drives,
brilliant dots of color against the neutral background of the dusty
wide streets. Their capacity for abandonment to pleasure, their
prodigality, was as great as ever, but the old-time picturesque
simplicity of it all seemed lacking--the simplicity which had once
mitigated much that would have been otherwise only brutish. The
dingily gaudy saloon fronts, like drabs in blowsy finery, struck a too
sophisticated, sinister note--which, after all, only sums up completely
the change which had taken place. Even the vices of the older
Morrison, in being systematized, had become infinitely more
complicated, too. It was no longer a river village. Morrison was a
city now.

Once, when a squatly huge, red-headed, red-shirted riverman with a
week's red stubble upon his cheeks, lurched out of a doorway ahead of
them and stood snarling malevolently at O'Mara, the girl shrank against
her companion and clutched his arm. The red-shirted one fell to
singing after they had passed. A maudlin rendition of "Harrigan,
That's Me," followed them long after they had rounded a corner. Steve
looked down and smiled casually into Barbara's wide and startled eyes.

"That's a river-boss," he explained, "enjoying what he considers a
roaring good time. His name is Harrigan. He works on the Reserve
Company's cut, which we are to move in the spring, and whenever he has
had a trifle more than enough he always sings that song. He's willing
to fight, too, to prove that it was written especially for him!"

The girl continued to gaze up at him. His short laugh failed entirely
to clear her face of apprehension.

"He's not exactly a friend of yours, is he?" she said.

"Well, not exactly," Steve admitted. "Not when he is in that frame of
mind!"

"Nor in any other," the girl persisted, and she glanced down