"Wouldn't encourage it _too_ much--livin' at the Palace Hotel,'" observed
Bowlder. "Sorry ye won't ride." He gathered the loose ends of the reins in
his hands, leaned far over the dashboard and struck the mare a hearty
thwack; the tattered banner of tail jerked indignantly, but she consented
to move down the road. Bowlder thrust his big head through the sun-curtain
behind him and continued the conversation: "See the White-Caps ain't got
ye yet."

"No, not yet." Harkless laughed.

"Reckon the boys 'druther ye stayed in town after dark," the other called
back; then, as the mare stumbled into a trot, "Well, come out and see us--
if ye kin spare time from the jedge's." The latter clause seemed to be an
afterthought intended with humor, for Bowlder accompanied it with the loud
laughter of sylvan timidity, risking a joke. Harkless nodded without the
least apprehension of his meaning, and waved farewell as Bowlder finally
turned his attention to the mare. When the flop, flop of her hoofs had
died out, the journalist realized that the day was silent no longer; it
was verging into evening.

He dropped from the fence and turned his face toward town and supper. He
felt the light and life about him; heard the clatter of the blackbirds
above him; heard the homing bees hum by, and saw the vista of white road
and level landscape, framed on two sides by the branches of the grove, a
vista of infinitely stretching fields of green, lined here and there with
woodlands and flat to the horizon line, the village lying in their lap. No
roll of meadow, no rise of pasture land, relieved their serenity nor
shouldered up from them to be called a hill. A second great flock of
blackbirds was settling down over the Plattville maples. As they hung in
the fair dome of the sky below the few white clouds, it occurred to