As soon as Zeke had eaten the frugal supper of mush and milk that Mrs. Britton set out for him, he sought the dilapidated little Broad Run grocery. The building was of logs, and had a pair of deer's antlers over the door for a sign that it was in one sense a public house. The low door, with its threshold on the level of the ground, the one square, dingy little window, and the shabby stick chimney, in the chinks of which the clay plaster was cleaving, gave the place a run-down expression. In looking at the building, one got a notion that it would like to slink away if it could. Zeke found nobody in but the proprietor, a boozy-headed looking man, with his hands usually in his trousers' pockets, and his swollen eye-lids never wide open. The stock of groceries was small; two barrels of corn-whisky and one of molasses were the dominant elements; a quart cup and some glasses stood on a dirty unpainted poplar counter, beside a pair of scales. The whole interior had a harmonious air of sloth, stupidity, and malpropriety; and its compound odors were as characteristic as indescribable. Zeke waited about awhile, wondering that no one should have come to the rendezvous. "Where's Jake Hogan?" he enquired of the "grocery-keeper." "I dunno." Zeke had anticipated this answer. The man never did know anything but the price of his liquors. It was the safest way for one who kept such a resort and heard so many confidences, and it was a way of answering questions that required the least exertion. "But I wuz to meet him here." "Oh, you wuz!" Then, after awhile, he asked, "Been over to his house?" "No."