A few nights later, Miss Jenny recognized her father's hand in a timid tap at the door. She opened it, and he stood before her, with a valise in his hand, equipped as for a journey. “I takes the stage to-night, Jinny dear, from Four Forks to 'Frisco. Maybe I may drop in on Jack afore I go. I'll be back in a week. Good-by.” “Good-by.” He still held her hand. Presently he drew her back into the room, closing the door carefully, and glancing around. There was a look of profound cunning in his eye as he said slowly,-- “Bear up, and keep dark, Jinny dear, and trust to the old man. Various men has various ways. Thar is ways as is common, and ways as is uncommon; ways as is easy, and ways as is oneasy. Bear up, and keep dark.” With this Delphic utterance he put his finger to his lips, and vanished. It was ten o'clock when he reached Four Forks. A few minutes later, he stood on the threshold of that dwelling described by the Four Forks “Sentinel” as “the palatial residence of John Ashe,” and known to the local satirist as the “ash-box.” “Hevin' to lay by two hours, John,” he said to his prospective son-in-law, as he took his hand at the door, “a few words of social converse, not on business, but strictly private, seems to be about as nat'ral a thing as a man can do.” This introduction, evidently the result of some study, and plainly committed to memory, seemed so satisfactory to Mr. McClosky, that he repeated it again, after John Ashe had led him into his private office, where, depositing his valise in the middle of the floor, and sitting down before it, he began carefully to avoid the eye of his host. John Ashe, a tall, dark, handsome Kentuckian, with whom even the trifles of life were evidently full of serious import, waited with a kind of chivalrous respect the further speech of his guest. Being utterly devoid of any sense of the ridiculous, he always accepted Mr. McClosky as a grave fact, singular only from his own want of experience of the class. “Ores is running light now,” said Mr. McClosky with easy indifference. John Ashe returned that he had noticed the same fact in the receipts of the mill at Four Forks. Mr. McClosky rubbed his beard, and looked at his valise, as if for sympathy and suggestion. “You don't reckon on having any trouble with any of them chaps as you cut out with Jinny?” John Ashe, rather haughtily, had never thought of that. “I saw Rance hanging round your house the other night, when I took your daughter home; but he gave me a wide berth,” he added carelessly. “Surely,” said Mr. McClosky, with a peculiar winking of the eye. After a pause, he took a fresh departure from his valise. “A few words, John, ez between man and man, ez between my daughter's father and her husband who expects to be, is about the thing, I take it, as is fair and square. I kem here to say them. They're about Jinny, my gal.” Ashe's grave face brightened, to Mr. McClosky's evident discomposure.