though it expressed itself with a silver tongue, failed him, and
he realized that the river's spent floods had left him stranded
with those other odds and ends of worthless drift that cumbered
its sun-scorched mud banks.

Something of all this passed through his mind as he sat there
sodden and dreamy, with the one fierce need of his nature quieted
for the moment. He had been stranded before, many times, in
those long years during which he had moved steadily toward a
diminishing heritage; indeed, nothing that was evil could contain
the shock of a new experience. He had fought and lost all his
battles--bitter struggles to think of even now, after the lapse
of years, and the little he had to tell of himself was an
intricate mingling of truth and falsehood, grotesque
exaggeration, purposeless mendacity.

He and Mahaffy had met exactly one month before, on the deck of
the steamer from which they had been put ashore at the river
landing two miles from Pleasantville. Mahaffy's historic era had
begun just there. Apparently he had no past of which he could be
brought to speak. He admitted having been born in Boston some
sixty years before, and was a printer by trade; further than
this, he had not revealed himself, drunk or sober.

At the judge's elbow Mr. Mahaffy changed his position with
nervous suddenness. Then he folded his long arms.

"You asked if there was any news, Price; while we were waiting
for the boat a raft tied up to the bank; the fellow aboard of it
had a man he'd fished up out of the river, a man who'd been