Will Bigelow was in his usual place behind the desk, and looked, I thought, rather disgruntled. His reply to my "Howdy, Will?" sounded somewhat snappish. But he got out of his chair and moved round the end of the desk just as the young man came out of the dining-room door. Then Will pulled up and I realised that he was calling my attention to the stranger. So far as I could see, he seemed an ordinary, everyday, good-looking, good-natured young man, whose naturally sunny disposition had been insulted by the food recently set before him. He wandered listlessly out upon the porch and stood there, with his hands in his pockets, looking up and down Centre Street, just then being shadowed into the warm, purple June dusk, beneath its double row of elms. We've always thought it a rather attractive street, and that night it seemed especially lively with its trickle of girls and boys strolling up and down, and the groups of grown folks on the corners, and Roland Burnette's summer suit conspicuous through Sothern and Lee's plate-glass windows; and I supposed the young man was admiring it all. But now I know him better. He felt just the same about Main Street, corner of Centre, Radville, as I should have about Broadway and Forty-second Street, New York, if you had set me down there and told me I'd got to get accustomed to the idea that I must live there. He was saying, deep down in his heart: "O _Lord_!"--with the rising inflection. Will grabbed my arm, without saying anything, and pulled me into the bar. "Hello!" I said, as he went round behind and opened the cigar-case, "what's up?" He took out two boxes of the finest five-centers in town and placed them before me. "Them's up," he said. "You win. Have one." It staggered me to have him give in that way; I had been looking forward to a long and diverting dispute. "I guess you've heard everything worth hearing about to-day's history," I said, disappointed, as I selected the least unpleasant looking of the cigars. "No, I haven't," he said. "I didn't have to hear anything. What earned you that smoke took place right here in this office.... Here," he said, striking a match for me. I had been trying to put the cigar away so that I might dispose of it without hurting Will's feelings, but he had me, so I recklessly poked the thing into the automatic clipper and then into my mouth. "What do you mean?" I asked, puffing. "Come 'long outside," said Will; and we went out on the porch just in time to see Mr. Duncan going wearily upstairs to his room. "I mean," said Will, _"him"_. And then he told me all about it. "But things like that don't happen every day," he wound up defensively. "I'll go you another cigar on to-morrow." "No, you won't," I said indignantly; and furtively dropped the infamous thing over the railing.