* * * * *

Early in the morning Lee Randon drove himself, in a Ford sedan, to a
station on the main line of a railway which bore him into the city and
his office. It was nine miles from Eastlake to the station, where he
left the car for his return; and, under ordinary circumstances, he
accomplished the distance in twenty minutes. The road was good and lay
through open rolling country, grazing and farmed land; he knew its
every aspect thoroughly, each hill and turning and old stone house, in
the pale green of early spring with the flushed petals of the apple
blossoms falling on the dark ploughed ground; yellow with grain; a
sweeping stubble with the corn shocked in which rabbit hunters, brown
like the sheaves, called to their dogs.

Now it was sombre and, in the morning and evening, wrapped in blue
mist; the air had the thick damp coldness usually precipitated in snow;
the cattle, gathered about the fodder spread in the fields, were
huddled against the rising winds. The smoke of a chimney was flattened
on a low roof; and Lee, who had sometimes wished that he were a part of
the measured countryside life, had a sudden feeling of revolt from such
binding circumstances. He wasn't surprised, this morning, that it was
difficult to get men to work in the comparative loneliness of the
farms, or that farmers' sons went continually to the cities.

When they couldn't get there they crowded into their borough towns,
into Eastlake, at every opportunity, attracted by the gaiety, the
lights, the stir, the contact with humanity. Before prohibition they
had drunk at the hotel bars, and driven home, with discordant laughter
and the urged clatter of hoofs, to the silence of star-lit fields. The
buggies had gone; High Street, on Saturday night, was filled with