Courtney Thane's fame had preceded him to Windomville. By this time, the entire district had heard of the man who was gassed, and who had actually won two or three medals for bravery in the Great War. The young men from that section of the state who had seen fighting in France were still in New York City, looking for jobs. Most of them had "joined up" at the first call for volunteers. Some of them had been killed, many of them wounded, but not one of them had received a medal for bravery. The men who had been called by the draft into the great National Army were all home again, having got no nearer to the battle front than an embarkation camp in New Jersey,--and so this tall, slender young fellow from the East was an object not only of curiosity but of envy. The Misses Dowd laid themselves out to make him comfortable,--as well as prominent. They gave him a corner room on the upper floor of Dowd's Tavern, dispossessing a tenant of twelve years' standing,--a photographer named Hatch, whose ability to keep from living too far in arrears depended on his luck in inveigling certain sentimental customers into taking "crayon portraits" of deceased loved ones, satisfaction guaranteed, frames extra. Two windows, looking out over the roof of the long front porch, gave him an unobstructed view of Main Street, including such edifices as the postoffice, the log-hut library, the ancient watering trough, the drug store, and the steeple of the Presbyterian Church rising proudly above the roofs of the houses in between. Main Street ran almost parallel with the river. With commendable forethought, the first settlers had built their houses and stores some little distance back from the stream along the summit of a wooded ridge perhaps forty feet above the river at its midsummer low-water level. The tremendous, devastating floods that came annually with the breaking up of winter failed to reach the houses,--although in 1883,--according to the records,--the water came up to within a foot of Joe Roush's blacksmith shop, situated at that time halfway down the slope, compelling the smith to think seriously of "moving up a couple of hops," a precaution that was rendered unnecessary by a subsequent midsummer bolt of lightning that destroyed not only the forge but shocked Joe so severely that he "saw green" for a matter of six weeks and finally resulted in his falling off the dock into deep water in the middle of what was intended to be a protracted spree brought on by the discovery that his insurance policy did not cover "loss by lightning." To this day, the older inhabitants of Windomville will tell you about the way his widow "took on" until she couldn't stand it any longer,--and then married George Hooper, the butcher, four months after the shocking demise of Joseph.