Flint's words were the signal for a storm of applause from the loiterers, and he walked out a hero. He was in a more amiable frame of mind when he climbed into the carryall. The old horse, feeling his head turned homeward, needed less urging than usual, and the young men lolled back, talking busily of old times and new. Brady was a typical business-man of the West,--cheerful, practical, a bit boastful, square-shouldered, clear-eyed and ruddy-faced, confident of himself, proud of his surroundings, sure that there were no problems of earth or Heaven with which America in general, and Philip Brady in particular, were not fitted to cope. Before he had uttered a dozen sentences, Flint began to realize how far apart they had drifted in the ten years since they had met. He experienced a vaguely hopeless sense of complexity in the presence of his friend's bustling frankness. He felt almost a hypocrite, and yet it seemed to him that any attempt at self-revelation would be useless, because the relative value, the _chiaro-oscuro_ of life, was so different to each. He took refuge, as we all do under such circumstances, in objectivity--asked heartily for the health of each member of Brady's family, listened with polite interest to the statistics of the growth of Bison, and then began to wonder what he should talk about next. As he cast his eye downward, a very practical subject suggested itself, for he saw with dismay that the cork was out of the molasses jug, from which the sticky fluid had already oozed forth, and was rapidly spreading itself over the floor of the carryall. "This is what comes of being obliging. Just look at this mess! What in time are we going to do about it, Brady?" Brady, being a man of action, wasted no energy in discussion. He jumped to the ground, pulled out first his overcoat and gripsack, fortunately unharmed, then the paper parcels of oatmeal and hominy, sticky and dripping. Swiftly corking the jug, he lifted it out of the carryall, together with the oilcloth strip, and deftly stood both against a fence by the roadside. Flint watched him with admiration. He felt himself supremely helpless in the presence of the direful calamity. How was he ever to get these bundles into condition to be put back into the wagon? How cleanse the oilcloth and the fatal jug? No house was in sight.