A sudden, jumbled vision of the past woven about this dwelling, his home, wheeled through Gordon's mind, scenes happy and unhappy; prevailing want and slim, momentary plenty; his father dead, in his coffin with a stony, pinched countenance, a jaw still unrelaxed above the bright flag that draped his nondescript uniform. Later events followed--his elder, vanished brother bullying him; the brief romance of his sister's courtship; the high, strident voice of his mother, that had always reminded him of her angry red nose--events familiar, sordid, unlovely, but now they seemed all of a piece of desirable, melancholy happiness; they endowed with a hitherto unsuspected value every board of the rough footing of the Makimmon dwelling, every rood of the poor, rocky soil, the weedy grass. He said aloud, in a subdued, jarring voice, "By God, but Simmons won't get it!" But the dreary whippoorwills, the feverish crickets, offered him no confirmation, no assurance. IX At noon, on the day following, he stood on the top of Cheap Mountain, gazing back into the deep, verdant cleft of Greenstream. From Cheap the reason for its name was clear--it flowed now direct, now turning, in a vivid green stream along the bases of its mountainous ranges; it flowed tranquil and dark and smooth between banks of tangled saplings, matted, multifarious underbrush, towering, venerable trees. It slipped like a river, bearing upon its balmy surface the promise of asylum, of sleep, of plenty, through the primitive, ruthless forest, which in turn pressed upon it everywhere the menace of its oblivion, its fierce, strangling life. He saw below him stretches of the steep, rocky trail by which he had mounted with the mounting sun; both had now reached the zenith of their day's journey; from there he would sink into the shadow, the secretiveness, of night.... Greenstream village lay twenty-eight miles behind; it was seventeen more to Sprucesap: he hurried forward. In his pocket rested not the thirty dollars, to which he had limited himself in thought, but his entire month's salary,--he might lose all by the lack of a paltry dollar or so. He was dressed with more care than on the day previous: he wore a dark suit, the coat to which now swung on a stick over his shoulder, a rubber collar, a tie of orange brocade erected on a superstructure of cardboard; his head was covered by a hard, black felt hat, pushed back from his sweating brow, and his trousers hung from a pair of obviously home-knitted, yarn suspenders. He shifted the stick from right to left. His revolver dragged chafing against a leg, and he removed it and thrust it into a pocket of the coat.