eople are cordially invited, you know. I
reckon I've got to be there."

"Why, Miss Garnet, my name's Legion, too. I didn't know we were such
close kin." He said good-day and departed, mildly wondering what the
next incident would be. The retiring year seemed to be rushing him
through a great deal of unfinished business.

XLI.

SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY

It was really a daring stroke, so to time the revival that the first
culmination of interest should be looked for on New Year's eve. On that
day business, the dry sorts, would be apt to decline faster than the
sun, and the nearness of New Year would make men--country buyers and
horsemen in particular--social, thirsty, and adventurous.

In fact, by the middle of the afternoon the streets around the
court-house square were wholly given up to the white male sex. One man
had, by accident, shot his own horse. Another had smashed a window, also
by accident, and clearly the fault of the bar-keeper, who shouldn't have
dodged. Men, and youths of men's stature, were laying arms about each
other's necks, advising one another, with profanely affectionate
assumptions of superiority, to come along home, promising on triple oath
to do so after one more drink, and breaking forth at unlooked-for
moments in blood-curdling yells. Three or four would take a fifth or
seventh stirrup cup, mount, start home, ride round the square and come
tearing up to the spot they had started from, as if they knew and were
showing how they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix, though beyond
a prefatory catamount shriek, the only news any of them brought was that
he could whip anything of his size, weight and age in the three
counties. The Jews closed their stores.

Proudfit had gone home. Enos had met a brother and a cousin, and come
back with them. John March, with his hat on, sat alone at his desk with
Fair's and Leggett's letters pinned under one elbow, his map under the
other, and the verbal counsels of Enos, General Halliday, and Proudfit
droning in his ears. He sank back with a baffled laugh.

He couldn't change a whole people's habit of thought, he reflected. Even
the _Courier_ followed the popular whim by miles and led it only by
inches. So it seemed, at least. And yet if one should try to make his
scheme a public one and leave the _Courier_ out--imagine it!

And must the _Courier_, then, be invited in? Must everybody and his
nigger "pass their plates?" Ah! how had a few years--a few