He walked moodily on in the moonlight, disdaining to either listen or glance behind him. There was a stoop to his shoulders now, a loose carriage which sometimes marks a man whose last shred of self-respect has gone, leaving him nothing but the naked virtues and vices with which he was born. McCloud's vices were many, though some of them lay dormant; his virtues, if they were virtues, could be counted in a breath--a natural courage, and a generous heart, paralyzed and inactive under a load of despair and a deep resentment against everybody and everything. He hated the fortunate and the unfortunate alike; he despised his neighbors, he despised himself. His inertia had given place to a fierce restlessness; he felt a sudden and curious desire for a physical struggle with a strong antagonist--like young Byram. All at once the misery of his poverty arose up before him. It was not unendurable simply because he was obliged to endure it. The thought of his hopeless poverty stupefied him at first, then rage followed. Poverty was an antagonist--like young Byram--a powerful one. How he hated it! How he hated Byram! Why? And, as he walked there, shuffling up the dust in the moonlight, he thought, for the first time in his life, that if poverty were only a breathing creature he would strangle it with his naked hands. But logic carried him no further; he began to brood again, remembering Tansey's insults and the white anger of young Byram, and the threats from the dim group around the stove. If they molested him they would remember it. He would neither pay taxes nor work for them. Then he thought of the path-master, reddening as he remembered Tansey's accusation. He shrugged his shoulders and straightened up, dismissing her from his mind, but she returned, only to be again dismissed with an effort. When for the third time the memory of the little path-master returned, he glanced up as though he could see her in the flesh standing in the road before his house. She _was_ there--in the flesh. The moonlight silvered her hair, and her face was the face of a spirit; it quickened the sluggish blood in his veins to see her so in the moonlight. She said: "I thought that if you knew I should be obliged to pay your road-tax if you do not, you would pay. Would you?" A shadow glided across the moonlight; it was the collie dog, and it came and looked up into McCloud's shadowy eyes. "Yes--I would," he said; "but I cannot." His heart began to beat faster; a tide of wholesome blood stirred and flowed through his veins. It was the latent decency within him awaking. "Little path-master," he said, "I am very poor; I have no money. But I will work out my taxes because you ask me." He raised his head and looked at the spectral forest where dead pines towered, ghastly in the moon's beams. That morning he had cut the last wood on his own land; he had nothing left to sell but a patch of brambles and a hut which no one would buy.