your supper and bed, if you like."

The young man slipped from the table, and lounged to the door. The
Doctor put his hands in his pockets and followed him. The young
man, as if in unconscious imitation, had put HIS hands in his
pockets also, and looked at him.

"I'll hear from you, then, when you are in San Jose?" said Dr.
West, looking past him into the grain, with a slight approach to
constraint in his indifference.

"Yes--if that's agreed upon," returned the young man, pausing on
the threshold. A faint sense of some purely conventional
responsibility in their position affected them both. They would
have shaken hands if either had offered the initiative. A sullen
consciousness of gratuitous rectitude in the selfish mind of the
father; an equally sullen conviction of twenty years of wrong in
the son, withheld them both. Unpleasantly observant of each
other's awkwardness, they parted with a feeling of relief.

Dr. West closed the door, lit his lamp, and, going to his desk,
folded the paper containing the memoranda he had just written and
placed it in his pocket. Then he summoned his foreman. The man
entered, and glanced around the room as if expecting to see the
Doctor's guest still there.

"Tell one of the men to bring round 'Buckeye.'"

The foreman hesitated. "Going to ride to-night, sir?"