--a
member of the present conclave.

Jake Crabbott who ran the store maintained, in all neighbourhood
differences, the studious attitude of an incorruptible neutral. Old
Grandsire Templey, his father-in-law, sat always in the same low chair
on the porch in summer and back of the stove in winter, with his palsied
hands crossed on his staff-head and his toothless gums mumbling in
inconsequential talk.

Old Grandsire was querulous and hazy in his mind but his memory went
back almost a century, and it clarified when near events were discarded
and he spoke of remoter times.

Now he sat mumbling away into his long beard, and in the door stood his
son-in-law, a sturdy man, himself well past middle-age, with a face that
was an index of hardihood, shrewdness, and the gift for knowing when and
how to hold his tongue.

On the steps of the porch, smiling like a good-humoured leviathan and
listening to the talk, sat "Peanuts" Causey, but he was not to be
allowed to sit long silent, because of all those gathered there he alone
had met and talked with the stranger.

"I fared past his dwellin' house day before yistiddy," declared Causey
in response to a question, "an' I 'lowed he war a right genial-spoken
sort of body."

The chorus of fresh interrogations was interrupted by a man who had not
spoken before. He rose from his seat and stepped across toward Peanuts,
and he was not prepossessing of appearance as he came to his feet.

Joe Doane, whom the pitiless directness of a rude environment had
rechristened "Hump" Doane, stood less than five feet to the crown of his
battered hat, and the hat sat on an enormous head out of which looked
the seamed and distorted face of a hunchback. But his shoulders were so
broad and his arms so long and huge that the man had the seeming of
gorilla hideousness and gorilla power.

The face, too, despite its soured scowl, held the alert of a keen
mentality and was dominated by eyes whose sleeping fires men did not
lightly seek to fan into blazes of wrath.

No man of either faction stood with a more uncompromising sincerity for
law and peace--but Hump Doane viewed life through the eyes of one who
has suffered the afflictions and mortification of a cripple in a land
that accepts life in physical aspects. His wisdom was darkened with the
tinge and colour of the cynic's thought. He trusted that man only who
proved his faith by his works, and believed all evil until it was
disproven. Like a nervous s