d staler. Some day there would come a change--as though the
miller had opened up another sluice--and a few vigorous splashings and
all would be changed even here. He viewed it speculatively, as one
outside it all. He suddenly felt that for him it was all over. And he
went into Mr. Boner's office.

Mr. Boner looked up sidewise.

"I've had a 'phone call from home."

Mr. Boner's eyes rolled slightly, showing the whites.

"There's some trouble there. I'll have to go."

A moment's pause. Mr. Boner cleared his throat. "All right," he said.
And then he bent back over his work.

He went and got his hat. With his hand on the swinging door he paused
and looked back. Not a head was raised. In the air there hovered a
droning, a rustling. It was like a vast, drowsy, slothful thing,
ignorant, dull, hateful. He pulled open the door. And then he left it.

Three hours later he was standing in the "Golden Rule" at Bloomfield.
Before him was a glass counter wherein were displayed knives and
cleavers and scissors and other cutlery. Above the counter, peering
at him rather anxiously over steel-rimmed spectacles, were the head
and shoulders of Mr. Burrus. Burrus! It had come to him on the train.
That was the name he had not caught. Burrus! Who else?

"And you say that the last time you saw him was when he got into his
buggy and drove away--last night? What makes you think he's gone
away?"

Mr. Burrus had been thoughtfully eyeing his stock of knives through
the case and as Joe finished he cast a quick, sidewise glance up at
him. Joe caught the flicker of it through the spectacles. "Well," he
began, and hesitated a little, "it's what I woulda done--under the
circumstances." Mr. Burrus' manner, usually so brisk and
business-like, seemed suddenly to have changed. He scratched his head
with a long and bony finger and looked up again at Joe. What he saw
seemed not to reassure him, for Joe had all of a sudden grown beyond
Bloomfield's conception of him. He towered above the cutlery
case--seemed to fill out his clothes. There was a set look about his
mouth and a steadiness about his eyes. Mr. Burrus paused again.

"Circumstances?" said Joe. "Under what circumstances?"

Mr. Burrus gazed off into the clear blue of the sky patch outlined by
his front door. "Well," he began cautiously, "I weren't callatin' to
say anything about this to anybody, but--I had to let Bushrod go."
The little weazened body with its scrawny neck rising out of the