ugh icicled ravines, and the new arrival
fresh from equatorial latitudes shivered under their sting.

He thrust his hands into his pockets and scowled about him. For so long
his memory had softened the uneven contours and colours of this town
with the illusory qualities of homesickness that now its tawdry
actuality brought something of a shock. It was all raw and comfortless,
and as the newcomer looked up at the forbidding summits he snarled to
himself, "They ain't a patch on the Andes."

Across from the old brick court house, with its dilapidated cupola and
its indefinable air of the mediaeval, sat the general store, proclaimed
in a sign of crippled lettering, "The Big Emporium." Tom Carr's nephews
directed this centre of industry and, from a grimy "office" above
stairs, Tom Carr directed his nephews. Until recent days he had also
directed, with a dictator's fiat power, most of the affairs of the
countryside. From that second-story room, the Gregories would have
declared with conviction Tom's father had "hired" Asa's father killed.
It was in its unadorned fashion a place of crumbling traditions.

Sitting there of late, Tom had done some unvarnished thinking anent the
expanding influence of young Boone Wellver.

He was sitting there now in the light and reek of a smoky lamp, by a
stove that was red-hot with no window open, and he was alone. He heard
the wooden stairs creaking under the ascending tread of stranger feet,
for to his acute ears footsteps were as individual as voices, and his
head inclined expectantly. Tom was waiting there for a man who had
written him a letter.

There followed a rap on the panels, and in response to his growled
permission the door opened and closed almost without sound, showing
inside the threshold a man clean shaven and inconspicuously dressed.

"Howdy, Saul," welcomed the seated baron of diminished powers. "I'd call
hit a right boldacious thing ter do--comin' back hyar--if I stood in
yore shoes."

Into the furtive eyes of the visitor came a shallow flash of bravado.

"Who's to hinder me, Tom?"

"Young Boone Wellver's got ter be a right huge power in these parts here
of late. He don't love ye none lavish, ef what folks norrates be true."

Saul seated himself, with a shrug of the shoulders. "I've had run-ins
with worse men than him," he declared, "and I'm still on the hoof."

"On the hoof an' fattenin', I should say," graciously acceded the leader
of the Carrs. "Ye've got a cor