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.

His long, melancholy face grew longer and more melancholy in the twilight,

while William Todd patiently whittled near by. Plattville had often

discussed the editor's habit of silence, and Mr. Martin had suggested that

possibly the reason Mr. Harkless was such a quiet man was that there was

nobody for him to talk to. His hearers did not agree, for the population

of Carlow County was a thing of pride, being greater than that of several

bordering counties. They did agree, however, that Harkless's quiet was not

unkind, whatever its cause, and that when it was broken it was usually

broken to conspicuous effect. Perhaps it was because he wrote so much that

he hated to talk.




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