Brooke appeared reflective. "I'm not quite sure whether I expected it or not, but I almost hope I did," he said. XIX. BROOKE'S BARGAIN. There was a portentous quietness in the little wooden town which did not exactly please Mr. Faraday Slocum, the somewhat discredited local agent of Grant Devine, as he ascended the steep street from the grocery store. The pines closed in upon it, but their sombre spires were growing dim, and the white mists clung about them, for dusk was creeping up the valley. The latter fact brought Slocum a sense of satisfaction, and at the same time a growing uneasiness. He had, as it happened, signally failed to collect a certain sum from the store-keeper, who had expressed his opinion of him and his doings with vitriolic candor, and it was partly as the result of this that very little escaped his notice as he proceeded with an ostentatious leisureliness towards his dwelling. A straggling row of stores and houses, log and frame and galvanized iron, jumbled all together in unsightly confusion, stretched away before him towards the gap in the forest where the railroad track came in, but it was the little groups of men who hung about them which occupied his quiet attention. He saluted them with somewhat forced good-humor as he went by, but there was no great cordiality in their responses, and some of them stared at him in uncompromising silence. There was, he felt, a certain tension in the atmosphere, and it was not without a purpose he stopped in front of the wooden hotel, where a little crowd had collected upon the verandah. "It's kind of sultry to-night, boys," he said. Nobody responded for a moment or two, and then there was an unpleasant laugh as somebody said, "You've hit it; I guess it is." Slocum remembered that most of those loungers had been glad to greet him, and even hand him their spare dollars, not long ago; but there was a decided difference now. He was a capable business man, who could make the most of an opportunity, and the inhabitants of the little wooden town had shown themselves disposed to regard certain trifling obliquities leniently, while they or their friends made satisfactory profits on the deals in ranching land and building lots he recommended. That, however, was while the boom lasted, but when the bottom had, as they expressed it, dropped out, and a good many of them found themselves saddled with unmarketable possessions, they commenced to be troubled with grave doubts concerning the rectitude of his conduct. Slocum was naturally quite aware of this, but he was a man of nerve, and quietly walked up the verandah steps. "It's that hot I must have a drink, boys. Who's coming in with me?" he said, genially. A few months ago a good many of them would have been willing to profit by the invitation, but that night nobody moved, and Slocum laughed softly. "Well," he said, "I'm not going to worry you. This is evidently a temperance meeting."