. Well, I
thought I should run across you some time." He shook hands with Westover,
in token of the gratitude which did not express itself in words. "How are
you? Treat you pretty well up at the Durgins'? I guess so. The old woman
knows how to cook, anyway. Jackson's about the best o' the lot above
ground, though I don't know as I know very much against the old man,
either. But that boy! I declare I 'most feel like takin' the top of his
head off when he gets at his tricks. Set down."

Whitwell, as Westover divined the man to be, took a seat himself on a
high stump, which suited his length of leg, and courteously waved
Westover to a place on the log in front of him. A long, ragged beard of
brown, with lines of gray in it, hung from his chin and mounted well up
on his thin cheeks toward his friendly eyes. His mustache lay sunken on
his lip, which had fallen in with the loss of his upper teeth. From the
lower jaw a few incisors showed at this slant and that as he talked.

"Well, well!" he said, with the air of wishing the talk to go on, but
without having anything immediately to offer himself.

Westover said, "Thank you," as he dropped on the log, and Whitwell added,
relentingly: "I don't suppose a fellow's so much to blame, if he's got
the devil in him, as what the devil is."

He referred the point with a twinkle of his eyes to Westover, who said:
"It's always a question, of course, whether it's the devil. It may be
original sin with the fellow himself."

"Well, that's something so," said Whitwell, with pleasure in the
distinction rather than assent. "But I guess it ain't original sin in the
boy. Got it from his gran'father pootty straight, I should say, and maybe
the old man had it secondhand. Ha'd to say just where so much cussedness
gits statted."

"His father's father?" asked Westover, willing to humor Whitwell's
evident wish to philosophize the Durgins' history.

"Mother's. He kept the old tavern stand on the west side of Lion's Head,
on the St. Albans Road, and I guess he kept a pootty good house in the
old times when the stages stopped with him. Ever noticed how a man on the
mean side in politics always knows how to keep a hotel? Well, it's
something curious. If there was ever a mean side to any question, old
Mason was on it. My folks used to live around there, and I can remember
when I was a boy hangin' around the bar-room nights hearin' him argue
that colored folks had no souls; and along about the time th