Half a dozen swivel chairs and as many spittoons gave the spot an air of luxurious informality to visiting farmers, whose well informed nostrils might have quivered distrustfully at the dusty stench of rotting law books had it not been synthesized with the comfortable aroma from the livery stable next door. Timothy Halleck himself, six feet two, large-boned, gaunt, hawk-nosed, with great brown eyes deep-socketed and thatched above with bristling brows, white-haired and gruff, ruled like a kindly tyrant in his chaotic kingdom. He was the town's one-man organized charity, a poverty-stricken philanthropist who denied himself so that he might help others; a widower, lonesome and fond of children. He had a few old friends, among them Stanley Brailsford now entering his office. "Well, Timothy," said Stud, uncomfortable in his serge suit and well-blacked bulldog shoes, "still making a living robbing the widows and orphans?" "Sit down, you lazy, hog-breeding son-of-a-gun and have a cigar," said the lawyer. "How are those emaciated razor-backs doing on that run-down farm of yours?" "Getting fatter and sassier every week," said Stud, biting off the tip of the cigar and scratching a match on the seat of his trousers. "What you been up to?" "Just the usual day. Forging checks and foreclosing on octogenarians. Where've you been keeping yourself?" "Anywhere the fish are biting. There ain't much work to be done on a farm in the spring time." "Need a good hand?" "Maybe you could do my whittling," Stud said. "Anyhow it's a standing invitation." "Might teach you how to raise hogs instead of razor-backs. Might breed you some beeves you could tell from bags of bones." "Who'd you find to defraud your clients meanwhile?" Stud asked. "Where would you find a man to run your shell game while you was gone?" The two old cronies glowered at each other joyfully and let fly at the nearest gobboon simultaneously and accurately, a symphony in expectoration which had taken nearly thirty years to perfect. Their talk ran on: the spring floods in Ohio and Indiana, the price of hogs, milk, and eggs, the new trailer factory which was to occupy the old wagon-works on the creek bottom, President Wilson and his professorial theories, the German Kaiser and his fight to remove one of his tenant farmers, the ridiculous little Balkan squabbles. And getting back to their own affairs Stud asked, "Are you going to the church supper this evening?" "No ..." said Halleck slowly. "Something about church suppers makes me feel ... Martha was always the center of everything, you know." "I know," Stud said. "You don't appreciate a woman until you've lost her," Halleck said quietly. "No," said Stud, "I don't suppose you do." "You're apt to take her for granted." "Sarah's happy," Stanley said. "We get along all right."