Ed Brann came in a moment later with his brother, and there was a significant little pause--a pause which grew painful till Albert turned and saw Brann, and called out: "Hello, Ed! How are you? Didn't know you were here." As he held out his hand, Brann, his face purple with shame and embarrassment, lumbered heavily across the room and took it, muttering some poor apology. "Hope y' don't blame me." "Of course not--fortunes o' war. Nobody to blame; just my carelessness.--Yes; I'll take turkey," he said to Maud, as he sank into the seat of honor. The rest laughed, but Brann remained standing near Albert's chair. He had not finished yet. "I'm mighty glad you don't lay it up against me, Lohr; an' I want to say the doctor's bill is all right; you un'erstand, it's _all right_." Albert looked at him a moment in surprise. He understood that this, coming from a man like Brann, meant more than a thousand prayers from a ready apologist. It was a terrible victory, and he was disposed to make it as easy for his rival as he could. "Oh, all right, Ed; only I'd calculated to cheat him out o' part of it--I'd planned to turn in a couple o' Blaine's _Twenty Years_ on the bill." Hartley roared, and the rest joined in, but not even Albert perceived all that it meant. It meant that the young savage had surrendered his claim in favor of the man he had all but killed. The struggle had been prodigious, but he had snatched victory out of defeat; his better nature had conquered. No one ever gave him credit for it; and when he went West in the spring, people said his passion for Maud had been superficial. In truth, he had loved the girl as sincerely as he had hated his rival. That he could rise out of the barbaric in his love and his hate was heroic. When Albert went to ride again, it was on melting snow, with the slowest horse Troutt had. Maud was happier than she had been since she left school, and fuller of color and singing. She dared not let a golden moment pass now without hearing it ring full, and she dared not think how short this day of happiness might be. IV At the end of the fifth week of their stay in Tyre a suspicion of spring was in the wind as it swept the southern exposure of the valley. March was drawing to a close, and there was more than a suggestion of April in the rapidly melting snow which still lay on the hills and under the cedars and tamaracks in the swamps. Patches of green grass, appearing on the sunny side of the road where the snow had melted, led to predictions of spring from the loafers beginning to sun themselves on the salt-barrels and shoe-boxes outside the stores. A group sitting about the blacksmith shop were discussing it. "It's an early seedin'--now mark my words," said Troutt, as he threw his knife into the soft ground at his feet. "The sun is crossing the line earlier this spring than it did last."