he shadow.

Caleb Hunter had been drowsing contentedly since early afternoon, his
chin on his chest and the bowl of his pipe drooping down over his
comfortably bulging, unbuttoned waistcoat. The lazy day was in his
blood and even the whine of the sawmills on the river-bank, a mile or
more to the south, tempered as it was by the distance to the drone of a
surly bumble-bee, still vaguely annoyed him. Tiny dots of men in
flannel shirts of brilliant hue, flashing from time to time out across
the log-choked space between the booms, caught his eye whenever he
lifted his head, during the passage of a green-sprayed glass from the
veranda rail to his lips, and almost reminded him of the unnatural
altitude of the mercury. He, without being analytical about it, would
have preferred it without the industry and the noise, even softened as
both were by the distance.

Morrison had changed since Caleb Hunter's father topped with the
white-columned house that hill above the river. In those days it had
been little more than a sleepy, if conservatively prosperous and
self-sufficient, community, without industry of any sort, or, it might
be added, ambition or seeming need of one. The Basin where the river
widened and ran currentless a mile or two from bank to bank, in Caleb's
father's time for weeks and weeks on end often had showed no more signs
of activity than a dawdling fisherman or two who angled now and then
and smoked incessantly. And now even the low-lying foothills in which
the elder Hunter had tried to see from homesick eyes a resemblance to
the outguard of his own Cumberlands were no longer given over to
pasturage. They had taken on an entirely different aspect.

The northern streets of the town were still dotted with the homes of
those families who had been content with just the shade and the silence
and the sheen of the river, and an ample though inaugmented income.
But the outside world, ignoring the lack of an invitation too long in
the coming, had in the last year or so grown in to meet it more than
half way. From the Hunter verandas a half-dozen red-roofed,
brown-shingled bungalows, half camps and half castles, were visible
across the land stretches where the cattle had grazed before. And just
beyond Caleb Hunter's own high box hedge, Dexter Allison's enormous
stucco and timber "summer lodge" sprawled amid a round dozen acres of
green lawn and landscape gardening, its front to the river.

To Dexter Allison's b