As he crossed the Square to the drug-store, where his cronies awaited him,
he turned again to look at the figure of the musing journalist. "I hope
he'll go out to the judge's," he said, and shook his head, sadly. "I don't
reckon Plattville's any too spry for that young man. Five years he's be'n
here. Well, it's a good thing for us folks, but I guess it ain't exactly
high-life for him." He kicked a stick out of his way impatiently. "Now,
where'd that imp run to?" he grumbled.

The imp was lying under the court-house steps. When the sound of Martin's
footsteps had passed away, she crept cautiously from her hiding-place and
stole through the ungroomed grass to the fence opposite the hotel. Here
she stretched herself flat in the weeds and took from underneath the
tangled masses of her hair, where it was tied with a string, a rolled-up,
crumpled slip of greasy paper. With this in her fingers, she lay peering
under the fence, her fierce eyes fixed unwinkingly on Harkless and the
youth sitting near him.

The street ran flat and gray in the slowly gathering dusk, straight to the
western horizon where the sunset embers were strewn in long, dark-red
streaks; the maple trees were clean-cut silhouettes against the pale rose
and pearl tints of the sky above, and a tenderness seemed to tremble in
the air. Harkless often vowed to himself he would watch no more sunsets in
Plattville; he realized that their loveliness lent a too unhappy tone to
the imaginings and introspections upon which he was thrown by the
loneliness of the environment, and he considered that he had too much time
in which to think about himself. For five years his introspections had
monotonously hurled one word at him: "Failure; Failure! Failure!" He
thought the sunsets were making him morbid. Could he have shared them,
that would have been different.