“Ya-hay, Mister Razor-back!” she shrilled. “How's that fer hi? Pap'll kill ye, Sunday. You'll be screechin' in hell in a week, an' we 'ull set up an' drink our apple-jack an' laff!” Martin pursued her lumberingly, but she was agile as a monkey, and ran dodging up and down the counters and mocked him, singing “Gran' mammy Tipsy-Toe,” till at last she tired of the game and darted out of the door, flinging back a hoarse laugh at him as she went. He followed; but when he reached the street she was a mere shadow flitting under the courthouse trees. He looked after her forebodingly, then turned his eyes toward the Palace Hotel. The editor of the “Herald” was seated under the awning, with his chair tilted back against a post, gazing dreamily at the murky red afterglow in the west. “What's the use of tryin' to bother him with it?” old Tom asked himself. “He'd only laugh.” He noted that young William Todd sat near the editor, whittling absently. Martin chuckled. “William's turn to-night,” he muttered. “Well, the boys take mighty good care of him.” He locked the doors of the Emporium, tried them, and dropped the keys in his pocket. As he crossed the Square to the drug-store, where his cronies awaited him, he turned again to look at the figure of the musing journalist. “I hope he'll go out to the judge's,” he said, and shook his head, sadly. “I don't reckon Plattville's any too spry for that young man. Five years he's be'n here. Well, it's a good thing for us folks, but I guess it ain't exactly high-life for him.” He kicked a stick out of his way impatiently. “Now, where'd that imp run to?” he grumbled. The imp was lying under the court-house steps. When the sound of Martin's footsteps had passed away, she crept cautiously from her hiding-place and stole through the ungroomed grass to the fence opposite the hotel. Here she stretched herself flat in the weeds and took from underneath the tangled masses of her hair, where it was tied with a string, a rolled-up, crumpled slip of greasy paper. With this in her fingers, she lay peering under the fence, her fierce eyes fixed unwinkingly on Harkless and the youth sitting near him. The street ran flat and gray in the slowly gathering dusk, straight to the western horizon where the sunset embers were strewn in long, dark-red streaks; the maple trees were clean-cut silhouettes against the pale rose and pearl tints of the sky above, and a tenderness seemed to tremble in the air. Harkless often vowed to himself he would watch no more sunsets in Plattville; he realized that their loveliness lent a too unhappy tone to the imaginings and introspections upon which he was thrown by the loneliness of the environment, and he considered that he had too much time in which to think about himself. For five years his introspections had monotonously hurled one word at him: “Failure; Failure! Failure!” He thought the sunsets were making him morbid. Could he have shared them, that would have been different.