"I ain't y'r uncle, young man." His dim eyes did not recognize the boy he had chased out of his plum patch years before. "I don't know yeh, neither," he added. "Oh, you will, later on. I'm from the East. I'm a sort of a relative to John Hannan." "I want 'o know if y' be!" the old man exclaimed, peering closer. "Yes. I'm just up from Rock River. John's harvesting, I s'pose?" "Yus." "Where's the youngest one--Will?" "William? Oh! he's a bad aig--he lit out f'r the West somewhere. He was a hard boy. He stole a hatful o' my plums once. He left home kind o' sudden. He! he! I s'pose he was purty well cut up jest about them days." "How's that?" The old man chuckled. "Well, y' see, they was both courtin' Agnes then, an' my son cut William out. Then William he lit out f'r the West, Arizony, 'r California, 'r somewhere out West. Never been back sence." "Ain't, heh?" "No. But they say he's makin' a terrible lot o' money," the old man said in a hushed voice. "But the way he makes it is awful scaly. I tell my wife if I had a son like that an' he'd send me home a bushel-basket o' money, earnt like that, I wouldn't touch finger to it--no sir!" "You wouldn't? Why?" "'Cause it ain't right. It ain't made right noway, you--" "But how is it made? What's the feller's trade?" "He's a gambler--that's his trade! He plays cards, and every cent is bloody. I wouldn't touch such money nohow you could fix it." "Wouldn't, heh?" The young man straightened up. "Well, look-a-here, old man: did you ever hear of a man foreclosing a mortgage on a widow and two boys, getting a farm f'r one quarter what it was really worth? You damned old hypocrite! I know all about you and your whole tribe--you old blood-sucker!" The old man's jaw fell; he began to back away. "Your neighbors tell some good stories about you. Now skip along after those cows, or I'll tickle your old legs for you!" The old man, appalled and dazed at this sudden change of manner, backed away, and at last turned and racked off up the road, looking back with a wild face, at which the young man laughed remorselessly. "The doggoned old skeesucks!" Will soliloquized as he walked up the road. "So that's the kind of a character he's been givin' me!" "Hullo! A whippoorwill. Takes a man back into childhood--No, don't 'whip poor Will'; he's got all he can bear now." He came at last to the little farm Dingman had owned, and he stopped in sorrowful surprise. The barn had been moved away, the garden ploughed up, and the house, turned into a granary, stood with boards nailed across its dusty, cobwebbed windows. The tears started into the man's eyes; he stood staring at it silently. In the face of this house the seven years that he had last lived stretched away into a wild waste of time. It stood as a symbol of his wasted, ruined life. It was personal, intimately personal, this decay of her home.