"You're welcome to have every skulking hound in the county on me," Christopher replied, loosening Sam Murray's restraining grasp. "If I can settle you I reckon I can settle them; but the day you open your lying mouth to me again I'll shoot you down as I would a mad dog--and wash my hands clean afterward!" He looked round for his harvest hat, picked it up from the floor where it had fallen, and walked slowly out of the room. In the broad noon outside he staggered an instant, dazzled by the glare. "Had a drop too much, ain't you, Mr. Christopher?" a voice inquired at his side, and, looking down, he saw Sol Peterkin sitting on a big wooden box just outside the store. "Not too much to mind my own business," was his curt reply. "Oh, no harm's meant, suh, an' I hope none's taken," responded the little man good-naturedly. "I saw you walk kinder crooked, that was all, an'it came to me that you might be needin' an arm toward home. Young gentlemen will be gentlemen, that's the truth, suh, an' in my day I reckon I've steadied the legs of mo' young beaux than you could count on your ten fingers. Good Lord, when it comes to thinkin' of those Christmas Eve frolics that we had befo' the war! Why, they use to say that you couldn't get to the Hall unless you swam your way through apple toddy. Jest to think! an' here I've been settin' an' countin' the bundles goin' up thar now--" "I'm looking for a box, Tom," said a clear voice at Christopher's back, "a big paper hat-box that ought to have come by express--" He turned quickly and saw Maria Fletcher in a little cart in the road, with a strange young man holding the reins. As Christopher swung round, she nodded pleasantly, but with a cool stare he passed down the steps and out into the road, carrying with him a distasteful impression of the strange young man. Yet from that first hurried glimpse he had brought away only the picture of a brown mustache. "By George, I'd like to see that fellow in the prize ring," he heard the stranger remark as he went by. "Do they have knock-outs around here, I wonder?" "Oh, I dare say he'd oblige you with one if you took the trouble to tread on his preserves," was the girl's laughing rejoinder.