Very little of ’Zeki’l’s past history was known in Zion Hill settlement. He had walked into Mr. Davy Tanner’s store one spring day, a dusty, penniless tramp, his clothes hanging loosely from his stooping shoulders, a small bundle in one hand, a rough walking-stick in the other. Mr. Davy Tanner was a soft-hearted old man, and the forlorn, friendless stranger appealed strangely to his sympathy, in spite of his candid statement that he had just finished a five-years’ term in the penitentiary for horse-stealing. "I tell you this, not because I think it’s anything to boast of, but because I don’t want to ’pear like I’m deceivin’ folks," he said in a dejected, melancholy tone, his face twitching, his eyes cast down. It was a haggard face, bleached to a dull pallor by prison life, every feature worn into deep lines. Evidently he had suffered beyond the punishment of the law, though how far it had eaten into his soul no man would ever learn, for after that simple statement of his crime and his servitude as a convict, he did not again, even remotely, touch upon his past, nor the inner history of his life. No palliative explanations were offered, no attempts made to soften the bare, disgraceful truth. Mr. Davy Tanner was postmaster as well as merchant, and his store was the general rendezvous for the settlement. The women came to buy snuff, and thread, and such cheap, simple materials as they needed for Sunday clothes; the men to get newspapers and the occasional letters coming for them, besides buying sugar and coffee, and talking over the affairs of the county and of Zion Hill church. They looked on ’Zeki’l Morgan with distrust and contempt, and held coldly aloof from him. But at last a farmer, sorely in need of help, ventured to hire him, after talking it over with Mr. Davy Tanner. "I tell you there ain’t a mite o’ harm in him." "S’pose he runs away with my horse, Mr. Tanner?" "I’ll stand for him ef he does," said Mr. Davy Tanner, firmly. "I don’t know any more th’n you about him, but I’m willin’ to trust him." "That’s the way you treat most o’ the folks that come about you," said his neighbor, smiling. "Well, I ain’t lost anything by it. It puts a man on his mettle to trust him—gives him self-respect, if there’s any good in him." All the year ’Zeki’l filled a hireling’s place, working faithfully; but the next year he bought a steer, a few sticks of furniture, and, renting the cabin and rocky hillside from Mr. Davy Tanner, set up housekeeping, a yellow cur and an old violin his companions. Then he managed to buy the place, and settled down. On one side he had the Biggers place, a fine, rich farm, and on the other Mr. Davy Tanner’s store and Zion Hill church. He attended the church regularly, but always sat quietly, unobtrusively in a corner, an alien, a man forever set apart from other men.