steadily a moment, and then turned and went out into the night alone.
Dallas Galbraith, with the detective's hand on his shoulder, stood looking at the door where their faces were massed, turned again towards him for the last time.
He had had his chance among them, and it was gone for ever.
"I did the best I could," he said, putting out his hand before him like a drowning man. Then Bunsen led him out through the dark side-door, and they saw him no more. That was the only stroke he made against the tide which was washing him out—out.
CHAPTER VI.
"How far to the Stone-post Farm now, driver?"
"Madam Galbraith owns land all along the road, but the Stone-post Farm is in the next county."
"She was a Dour by birth?"
The driver nodded shortly.
"And is fond, I surmise, of gathering her own kin about her?"
"I reckon she is. She has the country hereabouts swarming with 'em. Wimmen like her, without chick or child, are full of their whims."
"My own name is Dour," ventured the young man, buttoning his worn kid gloves nervously and coloring a little.
The driver, a short, pursy man, shot a keen glance over his shoulder at the lad's pale, hatchet face, long black hair pushed behind his ears, and well-kept clothes.
"You don't favor the old Madam's stock, anyhow," indifferently; and, flicking his leader's right ear, he began to whistle.
Paul Dour, who was pluming himself inwardly on the keenness of his guess about the old lady, lapsed into silence. He felt himself vaguely to be snubbed. These people of the West (as he called the Ohio valley in which he was traveling) disappointed him. It was his first journey out of New England into the raw, uncultured regions which form the members of the body of which it is the brain. He had intended to be charitable in his judgment of them—to insult no one by his criticism—making that allowance for all short-comings, social or otherwise, which became a just, clear-sighted philosopher of the transcendental school. Now, Paul's modicum of Concord philosophy had dribbled down to him diluted through a dozen conduits. Consequently it proved a very mild haschish indeed: his visions were few, though his mental contortions many. However, he had none the less faith in it. Here was the leaven which was to impregnate the mass of the American people. As clay ready for the hands of the potter, so the swarms of thriftless, inadequate slaveholders, and the brute physical and moneyed force of the Middle States, waited for the informing New England mind. Paul, like most of the lads and young women who go out from New England, anticipated a great deal of quiet amusement, though but little additional knowledge, from his venture. But it was dull work so far. The
Pennsylvania Dutch he had found curiously indifferent to the informing element which was to vivify them. Could this stolidity, he thought, with alarm, extend farther? His self-complacency was unusually thin-skinned: every pin-prick caused a painful contraction. The very farm-houses which he was passing now, with their solid foothold of unhewn stone, their wide acres, their giant oaks pre-empting the earth, as it were, and all the material good that therein is, annoyed him. They would better have befitted his own section, the old home stead of the country, than did its flimsy white wooden tenements. He missed the dissatisfied, tentative disquiet to which he was used, in this warm, mellow air, and in the composed faces of the people. He was curiously let alone. Nobody seemed to need his history or his thought. The people were decent, decorous, minded their own business.
But as for the conversation, what seed of progress lay in that? Facts—facts—facts—he heard nothing else, from the New York auction clerk who had crossed
