"The men stopped just long enough to hear how it was, and started for the
Cross-Roads; but the Cross-Roads people caught them in an ambush and not
many of our folks got back.

"We really never did get even with them, though all the early settlers
lived and died still expecting to see the day when Plattville would go
over and pay off the score. It's the same now as it was then, good stock
with us, bad stock over here; and all the country riff-raff in creation
come and live with 'em when other places get too hot to hold them. Only
one or two of us old folks know what the original trouble was about; but
you ask a Plattville man, to-day, what he thinks of the Cross-Roads and
he'll be mighty apt to say, 'I guess we'll all have to go over there some
time and wipe those hoodlums out.' It's been coming to that a long time.
The work the 'Herald' did has come nearer bringing us even with Six-Cross-
Roads than anything else ever has. Queer, too--a man that's only lived in
Plattville a few years to be settling such an old score for us. They'll do
their best to get him, and if they do there'll be trouble of an illegal
nature. I think our people would go over there again, but I expect there
wouldn't be any ambush this time; and the pioneers, might rest easier in--"
He broke off suddenly and nodded to a little old man in a buckboard,
who was turning off from the road into a farm lane which led up to a trim
cottage with a honeysuckle vine by the door. "That's Mrs. Wimby's
husband," said the judge in an undertone.

Miss Sherwood observed that "Mrs. Wimby's husband" was remarkable for the
exceeding plaintiveness of his expression. He was a weazened, blank, pale-
eyed little man, with a thin, white mist of neck whisker; his coat was so
large for him that the sleeves were rolled up from his wrists with several
turns, and, as he climbed painfully to the ground to open the gate of the