When the laugh had subsided, Nathan, whose cheeks were still burning at the slighting way in which Billy Talbot had spoken of Richard, and who had sat hunched up in his chair combing the white hair farther over his ears with his long, spare fingers, a habit with him when he was in deep thought, lifted his head and remarked, quietly, addressing the room rather than Talbot: "Richard's mind is not on his cellar; he's got something to think of besides Madeira and cards and dogs." And he looked toward Waggles. "You will all, one day, be proud to say that he lived in our town. Richard is a genius, one of the most remarkable men of the day, and everybody outside of this place knows it; you will be compelled to admit it yet. I left him only half an hour ago, and he is just perfecting a motor, gentlemen, which will--" "Does it go yet, Nathan?" interrupted Cobb, who was filling a glass from a decanter which a brown-coated darky had brought him. Cobb's wife was Nathan's cousin, and, therefore, he had a right to be familiar. "I went to see his machine the other day, but I couldn't make anything out of it. Horn is a little touched here, isn't he?" and he tapped his forehead and smiled knowingly. "No, Amos, the motor was not running when I left the shop," answered Nathan, dryly and with some dignity, "but it will be, he assured me, perhaps by to-morrow." He could fight Billy Talbot, but he never crossed swords with Cobb, never in late years. Cobb was the one man in all the world, he once told Richard, with whom he had nothing in common. "Oh, to-morrow?" And Cobb whistled as he put down the decanter and picked up the day's paper. It was one of Cobb's jokes--this "to-morrow" of his neighbors. "What was a Northern man's to-day was always a Southern man's to-morrow," he would say. "I hope this young man of whom you speak so highly is not walking in the footsteps of this genius of a father? He looks to me like a young fellow that had some stuff in him if anybody would bring it out." The half-concealed sneer in Cobb's voice grated also on old Judge Bowman, who threw down his book and looked up over his bowed spectacles. He was a testy old fellow, with a Burgundy face and shaggy white hair, a chin and nose that met together like a parrot's, and an eye like a hawk. It was one of his principles to permit none of his intimates to speak ill of his friends in his hearing. Criticisms, therefore, by an outsider like Cobb were especially obnoxious to him.