"Hello, Morton! here, eh? Been hunting? This don't pay. A young man that is going to get on in the world oughtn't to set here in the sunshine talking to the girls. Leave that for nights and Sundays. I'm afeard you won't get on if you don't work early and late. Eh?" And the captain chuckled his hard little laugh. Morton felt all the pleasure of the glorious afternoon vanish, as he rose to go. He laid the turkey destined for Patty inside the door, took up the other, and was about to leave. Meantime the captain had lifted the white gourd at the well-curb, to satisfy his thirst. "I saw Kike just now," he said, in a fragmentary way, between his sips of water--and Morton felt his face color at the first mention of Kike. "I saw Kike crossing the creek on your mare. You oughtn't to let him ride her; she'll break his fool neck yet. Here comes Kike himself. I wonder where he's been to?" Morton saw, in the fixed look of Kike's eyes, as he opened the gate, evidence of deep passion; but Captain Enoch Lumsden was not looking for anything remarkable about Kike, and he was accustomed to treat him with peculiar indignity because he was a relative. "Hello, Kike!" he said, as his nephew approached, while Watch faithfully sniffed at his heels, "where've you been cavorting on that filley to-day? I told Mort he was a fool to let a snipe like you ride that she-devil. She'll break your blamed neck some day, and then there'll be one fool less." And the captain chuckled triumphantly at the wit in his way of putting the thing. "Don't kick the dog! What an ill-natured ground-hog you air! If I had the training of you, I'd take some of that out." "You haven't got the training of me, and you never will have." Kike's face was livid, and his voice almost inaudible. "Come, come, don't be impudent, young man," chuckled Captain Lumsden. "I don't know what you call impudence," said Kike, stretching his slender frame up to its full height, and shaking as if he had an ague-chill; "but you are a tyrant and a scoundrel!" "Tut! tut! Kike, you're crazy, you little brute. What's up?" "You know what's up. You want to cheat me out of that bottom land; you have got it advertised on the back side of a tree in North's holler, without consulting mother or me. I have been over to Jonesville to-day, and picked out Colonel Wheeler to act as my gardeen." "Colonel Wheeler? Why, that's an insult to me!" And the captain ceased to laugh, and grew red.