ots in a land of oases, he had closed his bungalow in disgust and
taken a salaried position with an oil concern operating in Mexico.

* * * * *

Sometimes there comes into a Kentucky midsummer a strayed touch of
autumn. Then while the woods stand freckled and the ironweed waves its
sprays of dusty purple, a touch of languor steals into the sky, and the
horizon veils itself with a mist that is sweetly melancholy.

On such a period, when the sun should have held its dog-day heat, yet
fell in mellow mildness, Boone Wellver sat on a low, hickory-withed
chair outside the door of McCalloway's house.

He did not require the spell of that indefinable melancholy which lay
along the hilltops to bring home to him a mood of sadness, because for
two weeks he had been here alone with his thoughts. It had been his whim
during that time to isolate himself completely, and to wear, as a man
may wear old clothes or old shoes, the ease of solitude that makes no
demands upon one's conventional self.

In Washington there was always the need of living before other eyes.
Here he had not even ridden across the ridge for letters or papers.

At the moment, while the bees droned loudly about him and the mountains
slept in their ancient impassivity, he held on his knees Victor
McCalloway's tin dispatch box, and his eyes were deep with thoughts of
bereavement.

The veteran had said that, on his death, Boone might turn the key of
that battered receptacle and read the papers which would give him a full
knowledge of the identity of his benefactor.

Once he had declared, half smilingly and half in earnest:

"I suppose that at any time you hear nothing of me for five years you
may assume my death." It had been five years now, and more, since he had
left the little world of his hermitage, and no word had come back to
Boone.

The young man's heart was heavy with loneliness, and as he sat there
alone, he ached to know the secret that had shadowed the life of the man
to whom his devotion was almost an idolatry; the secret that had robbed
of a name one whose past must have been both colourful and tragic.

In those five years since they had met, Boone had passed the milestones
from the local to the national, and if he held the respect of his
colleagues he owed it all to Victor McCalloway. They said that he was a
man with a broad and national vision. That, too, if it were true, was a
reflection of the soldier's teachin