The tall, loose-jointed man sat down in the wagon suddenly and took up the reins. "They're gettin' a little mite personal, and I guess it's 'bout time for you to be goin', Simpson!" The tone was jocular, but the red mustaches drooped, and the half-hearted cut he gave to start the white mare on her homeward journey showed that he was not in his usual reckless mood. "It's a lie!" he burst out in a vindictive undertone, as the mare swung into her long gait. "It's a lie! I thought 't was somebody's wash! I ain't an enemy!" While the crowd at the raising dispersed in happy family groups to their picnics in the woods; while the Goddess of Liberty, Uncle Sam, Columbia, and the proud States lunched grandly in the Grange Hall with distinguished guests and scarred veterans of two wars, the lonely man drove, and drove, and drove through silent woods and dull, sleepy villages, never alighting to replenish his wardrobe or his stock of swapping material. At dusk he reached a miserable tumble-down house on the edge of a pond. The faithful wife with the sad mouth and the habitual look of anxiety in her faded eyes came to the door at the sound of wheels and went doggedly to the horse-shed to help him unharness. "You did n't expect to see me back to-night, did you?" he asked satirically; "leastwise not with this same horse? Well, I'm here! You need n't be scairt to look under the wagon-seat, there ain't nothin' there, not even my supper, so I hope you're suited for once! No, I guess I ain't goin' to be an angel right away, neither. There wa'n't nothin' but flags layin' roun' loose down Riverboro way, 'n' whatever they say, I ain't sech a hound as to steal a flag!" It was natural that young Riverboro should have red, white, and blue dreams on the night after the new flag was raised. A stranger thing, perhaps, is the fact that Abner Simpson should lie down on his hard bed with the flutter of bunting before his eyes, and a whirl of unaccustomed words in his mind. "For it is your star, my star, all our stars together." "I'm sick of goin' it alone," he thought; "I guess I'll try the other road for a spell;" and with that he fell asleep.