It is the manner of the taking-off of this one of the Flemings that makes material for the story I am telling here. By all accounts it would appear that the Faxons had been rather a weak-spined race who fought mostly on the defensive and were lacking in that malignant persistency that made old Ranee Fleming's name one to scare bad children with in the unsettled days following the Surrender. I remember how we boys used to watch him, half-fearsomely and half-admiringly, when he came to town on a Court Monday or on a Saturday and swaggered about, unkempt and mud-crusted and frequently half drunk. Late in the afternoon he would mount unsteadily to the tilted seat of his spring wagon and go back home to the Gum Spring country lashing at his team until they danced with terror and splitting the big road wide open through the middle. And that night at the places where the older men congregated there would be tales to tell of those troubled mid-sixties when old Ranee had worn the turn-coat of a guerilla, preying first on one side and then on the other. Now young Jim Faxon, last male survivor of his clan, and direct in the line of the original fighting Faxons, was a different sort of person altogether, a quiet, undersized, decent-spoken young chap who minded well his own business, which was keeping a truck stand on the Market. He lived with his aunt, old Miss Puss Whitley--certain women were still called Miss in our town even though they had been married for twenty years and widowed for as many more, as was the case in this instance--and he was her main support and stand-by. It was common rumor that when young Jim came of age and had a little money laid by on his own account, he meant to marry the little Hardin girl--Emmy Hardin--and this was a romance that nearly everybody in town knew about and favored most heartily. She was his distant cousin and an orphan, and she lived with Miss Puss too. Sometimes in good weather she would come in with him and help out at the truck stand. She was a little quail-like creature, quick in her movements and shy as a bunny, with pretty irregular features and a skin so clear and white that when she blushed, which was a hundred times a day, the color would drench her face to the temples and make her prettier than ever. All of Jim's regular customers approved his choice of a sweetheart and wished him mighty well. He was regarded as about the pick of the thinned-out Faxon breed.