rwise, he
might have been a Moor, except for his color, which was about the only
racial characteristic he had. He had been educated abroad and, after
the English habit, had travelled everywhere. And yet I can imagine no
more lonely way between the eternities than the path Grayson trod alone.

He came to the Gap in the early days, and just why he came I never
knew. He had studied the iron question a long time, he told me, and
what I thought reckless speculation was, it seems, deliberate judgment
to him. His money "in the dirt," as the phrase was, Grayson got him a
horse and rode the hills and waited. He was intimate with nobody.
Occasionally he would play poker with us and sometimes he drank a good
deal, but liquor never loosed his tongue. At poker his face told as
little as the back of his cards, and he won more than admiration--even
from the Kentuckians, who are artists at the game; but the money went
from a free hand, and, after a diversion like this, he was apt to be
moody and to keep more to himself than ever. Every fortnight or two he
would disappear, always over Sunday. In three or four days he would
turn up again, black with brooding, and then he was the last man to
leave the card-table or he kept away from it altogether. Where he went
nobody knew; and he was not the man anybody would question.

One night two of us Kentuckians were sitting in the club, and from a
home paper I read aloud the rumored engagement of a girl we both
knew--who was famous for beauty in the Bluegrass, as was her mother
before her and the mother before her--to an unnamed Virginian. Grayson
sat near, smoking a pipe; and when I read the girl's name I saw him
take the meerschaum from his lips, and I felt his eyes on me. It was a
mystery how, but I knew at once that Grayson was the man. He sought me
out after that and seemed to want to make friends. I was willing, or,
rather he made me more than willing; for he was irresistible to me, as
I imagine he would have been to anybody. We got to walking together
and riding together at night, and we were soon rather intimate; but for
a long time he never so much as spoke the girl's name. Indeed, he kept
away from the Bluegrass for nearly two months; but when he did go he
stayed a fortnight.

This time he came for me as soon as he got back to the Gap. It was
just before midnight, and we went as usual back of Imboden Hill,
through moon-dappled beeches, and Grayson turned off into the wo