Although Joe moved briskly along his way, his feet as light as if they carried him to some destination of certain felicity, there was a cloud upon his heart. This arrangement which his mother had made in an hour of panic had disordered his plans and troubled the bright waters of his dreams. Plans and dreams were all his riches. They were the sole patrimony of value handed down from Peter Newbolt, the Kentucky gentleman, who had married below his state and carried his young mountain wife away to the Missouri woods to escape the censure of family and criticism of friends. That was the only legacy, indeed, that Joe was conscious of, but everybody else was aware that old Peter had left him something even more dangerous than dreams. That was nothing less than a bridling, high-minded, hot-blooded pride--a thing laughable, the neighbors said, in one so bitterly and hopelessly poor. "The pore folks," the neighbors called the Newbolts in speaking of them one to another, for in that community of fairly prosperous people there was none so poor as they. The neighbors had magnified their misfortune into a reproach, and the "pore folks" was a term in which they found much to compensate their small souls for the slights which old Peter, in his conscious superiority, unwittingly put upon them. To the end of his days Peter never had been wise enough to forget that nature had endowed him, in many ways, above the level of the world to which Fate had chained his feet, and his neighbors never had been kind enough to forget that he was poor. Even after Peter was dead Joe suffered for the family pride. He was still spoken of, far and near in that community, as the "pore folks's boy." Those who could not rise to his lofty level despised him because he respected the gerund, and also said _were_ where they said _was_, and _there are_, where usage made it _they is_. It was old Peter's big-headedness and pride, they said. What business had the pore folks's boy with the speech of a school-teacher or minister in his mouth? His "coming" and his "going," indeed! Huh, it made 'em sick. Joe had lived a lonely, isolated life on account of the family poverty and pride. He was as sensitive as a poet to the boorish brutality, and his poor, unlettered, garrulous mother made it worse for him by her boasting of his parts. She never failed to let it be known that he had read the Bible through, "from back to back," and the _Cottage Encyclopedia_, and the _Imitation of Christ_, the three books in the Newbolt library.