The necessity for haste was the one thing he urged on Stephen and his brother; but it was December before all of the shares were actually taken, and he was forced to own that to start across the plains in the dead of winter was out of the question, even if it had been feasible to make the first stage of the journey down the Ohio. They must wait until spring. This delay had seemed the last vengeful fling of fate. Whatever was evil to know and endure he had known and endured on that far frontier where his best years had been spent; he had acquired a fortitude and patience that rarely failed him; he had accepted hardship and danger as the natural, expected, things of life; and the ordinary deaths he had seen men die, by knife or bullet, he had himself bravely faced; but the slow approach of an enemy he could not see, but could only feel in his wasted muscles and weakened will, appalled him. “I can feel it here—here—gnawing at my throat, gnawing like some hungry varment,” he told Stephen Landray. “I reckon if I was a praying man, I'd pray to die a sudden death; this is just wasting away—wasting and remembering, and hoping. God Almighty! Such hope and such remembering.” But it was only to Stephen that he told his fears; he did not speak of them to the others, and they never guessed that a fever of despair was consuming him. Stephen Landray was as free from superstitious imaginings as most men, but Rogers's low spirits, coupled with the sorrow and apprehension Virginia vainly strove to conceal, had its effect on his mental vigour. A dozen times he was on the verge of appealing to the other shareholders for his release from the active direction of an enterprise that was going forward under such distressing auspices; but he comforted himself with the thought that his absence would only be for a year or two. Pride had a good deal to do with keeping him true to his purpose. He could recall the day when the property he and Bushrod had inherited had constituted a great fortune, by far the greatest in Benson, but times were slowly changing, improvements in machinery and methods had closed the carding and fulling mill his father had built during his lifetime; the distillery, which they had sold to Tucker, no longer sent its produce by flat-boat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans. Shrewder men than he and his brother, had taken away their once profitable business as forwarding agents, and the great warerooms at the mill, which had once been piled high with barrels of flour awaiting shipment, were now all but empty. He felt that they were being slowly but surely elbowed into the background by strangers with greater capital or greater ability. This was a sore grief to both brothers, though it was, perhaps, not the loss of money they dreaded so much as the fancied loss of prestige.