"There's an old boy for you," said Moreton, resuming his seat at the table and motioning Reynolds to do likewise. "I have never seen another at all like him. Make a friend of him, and there's no end to the good he will do you. There's not a doubt that he left urgent business to come here and get me into his party. I'm delighted that you were here, don't you know, for we'll have a rare lark. General DeKay is one of your fine old-time Southern planters, I'm told, whose hospitality is as broad as his fields." "I'm a fool for consenting to join you," Reynolds bluntly exclaimed, "but I am committed to the folly and must make the most of it." "Since when have you come to consider a day or so behind the dogs in good quail cover a folly?" said Moreton, with a ring of good-humored resentment in his voice. "You misconstrue me," replied Reynolds, "I shrink from the other feature of the affair. I am out of society for good and all. I fear there will be more women than dogs and quail." Moreton laughed as a vision of Mr. Noble's charming daughter arose in his mind. She at least would be one of the party. CHAPTER IV. WHITE PLAYS "SEVING UP." Reynolds spent the next few days with Moreton, and, before he was fully aware of it, he had accepted an invitation to dine at Mr. Noble's house, where he would meet "two or three charming friends," as the banker had declared, "without the least formality in the world." The weather had taken a delightful change, the wind shifting to the south and bringing from the Gulf of Mexico, over the vast extent of pine woods, a summer balminess and pungency. The sky, without a cloud, blue and dreamy bent above the gray-green hills with a Sabbath purity that made every aspect of the landscape surrounding the little city one of sweet guardianship and secure repose, quite at variance with certain social conditions which rendered a considerable portion of the city's populace at times turbulent and dangerous. Many miners and operatives in the vast iron works had fallen into the habit of coming together, at such hours as they were unemployed, in the gaudily tinseled liquor saloons and gambling dens with which certain streets were liberally supplied. Here they would meet the quiet-mannered but impetuous and bellicose mountaineers, with whom they quarreled and fought, sometimes with fatal results.