that in casting her lot with me she would be choosing not only the
comfort of living with her only son but the protection of one who had
proved himself a man.

I glowed with pride as I thought of our future together, and of all I
would do to make her life happy and easy. I never was a better boy in my
life than on that winter evening when I went up the hilly street from
the tavern in Madison to the place on a high bluff overlooking a sheet
of ice, stretching away almost as far as I could see, which they told me
was Fourth Lake, to the house in which I was informed Doctor Rucker
lived--a small frame house among stocky, low burr oak trees, on which
the dead leaves still hung, giving forth a dreary hiss as the bitter
north wind blew through them.

I knocked at the door, and was answered by a red-haired young woman,
with a silly grin on her face, the smirk flanked on each side with
cork-screw curls which hung down over her bright blue dress; which, as I
could see, was pulled out at the seams under her round and shapely arms.
She put out a soft and plump hand to me, but I did not take it. She
looked in my face, and shrank back as if frightened.

"Where's Rucker?" I asked; but before I had finished the question he
came forward from the other room, clothed in dirty black broadcloth, his
patent-medicine-pedler's smile all over his face, with a soiled frilled
shirt showing back of his flowered vest, which was unbuttoned except at
the bottom, to show the nasty finery beneath. He had on a broad black
scarf filling the space between the points of his wide-open standing
collar, and sticking out on each side. I afterward recalled the
impression of a gold watch-chain, and a broad ring on his finger. He
was quite changed in outward appearance from the poverty-stricken skunk