"I don’t know that he knows her well enough for _that_," he replied. "The people round here think I’m tough enough, but you drummers—huh! some of them look on you as the very advance agents of destruction." "That’s a fact," Masters sighed, "the profession is getting a black eye in the rural districts. They think we are as bad as show people. By George, there she is now!" "Yes, that’s her," and the young planter glanced towards the front doorway through which Virginia Hemingway was entering. So fixed was the drummer’s admiring gaze upon the pretty creature, that he failed to notice that his companion had quietly slipped towards the rear of the store. Chester stood for a moment in the back doorway, and then stepped down outside and made his way into the wood near by. The drummer sauntered behind the counter towards the front, till he was near the show-case at which the girl was making her purchase, and there he stood, allowing the fire of his cigar to die out as he watched her, while Wilson was exhibiting to her a drawer full of thread for her to select from. "By all that’s good and holy, she simply caps the stack!" Masters said to himself; "and to think that these galoots out here in the woods are not onto it. She’d set Peachtree Street on fire. I’m going to meet that girl if I have to put on old clothes and work for day wages in her mother’s cornfield. Great goodness! here I am, a hardened ladies’ man, feeling cold from head to foot on a hot day like this. I’m hit, by George, I’m hit! Freddy, old boy, this is the thing you read about in books. I wonder if—" But she was gone. She had tripped out into the sunshine. He saw the yellow light fall on her abundant hair and turn it into a blaze of gold. As if dreaming, he went to the door and stood looking after her as she moved away on the dusty road. "I see you are killing time." It was George Wilson at his elbow. "I’ll be through here and with you in a minute. My crowd is thinning out now. That’s the way it comes—all in a rush; like a mill-dam broke loose." "Oh, I’m in no hurry, Wilson," said Masters, his gaze bent upon the bushes behind which Virginia had just disappeared. "Say, now, old man, don’t say you won’t do it; the fact is, I want to be introduced to that girl—the little daisy you sold the thread to. By glory, she is the prettiest little thing I ever saw."