“You were so quiet just now that I thought--really, I didn't know what to think. I was telling you--” “I know, Nelson.” Baker's unsteady hand was on the latch of the door. “Never you mind, I'll call on you if I want anything. I've got yore friendship, I reckon, an' that's enough fer me.” He opened the door and glided out into the hall. “Good-night, Nelson.” “Good-night, Pole, good-night. God bless you, old man!” On the lonely road leading to his house the mountaineer stopped and drew the bottle from his pocket. “You dem little devil!” he said, playfully, holding it up before his eyes in the starlight. “Here I've gone all day in Atlanta, passin' ten 'thousand barroom doors, swearin' by all that was holy that I'd fetch Nelson Floyd his news with a sober head on my shoulders an' a steady tongue _in_ that head; an' I rid, too, by hunkey, all the way from Darley out here with a hack-driver smellin' like a bung-hole, with two quarts under his seat an' no tellin' how many under his hide. I say I got through all that, although my jaws was achin' tell they felt like they was loose at the sockets, an' I 'lowed I'd slide safe to the home-base, when _you_--you crawled up under my nose in the dark like a yaller lizard, with that dern tale about yore ripe old age an' kingly flavor. '_Memento_' hell!” Pole was using Floyd's word for the first time. “I'd like to know what sort of a memento you'd make outside of a man's stomach. No, Poley, I reckon you've reached yore limit.” The mouse squeaked again. Pole chuckled. He held the flask aloft and shook it. “Gentlemen,” he said to the countless stars winking merrily down from above, “take one with me,” and he drank. XXI TWO days after this, Nathan Porter brought home the news of what had happened to Floyd. The family were seated at the dinner-table when he came in warm from his walk along the dusty road. He started to sit down in his place without his coat, but Cynthia rose and insisted on his donning it. “Folks is sech eternal fools!” he said, as he helped his plate to a green hillock of string-beans, from the sides of which protruded bowlders of gray bacon, and down which ran rivulets of grease. “What have they been doing now?” asked his wife, curiously. “They hain't doin' nothin' in town but talkin',” Porter said, in a tone of disgust. “Looks like all business has come to a dead halt, so that everybody kin exchange views about what Nelson Floyd has discovered about his kin. He's found a man--or Pole Baker did fer 'im, when Pole was drunk down in Atlanta--who don't deny he's his uncle--his daddy's own brother--an' you'd think Floyd had unearthed a gold-mine, from all the talk an' well-wishin' among the elect. Old Duncan an' Colonel Price helt a whole crowd spellbound at the post-office this mornin' with the'r tales about the past power an' grandeur of the Nelson an' Floyd families in America, an' all they'd done fer the'r country an' the like.”