"But where'll I go?" Marley held out his hands with a gesture that was pleading, pathetic. Thus he waited for Powell's reply. Powell smoked thoughtfully for a moment and then began: "When I was going to the law school in Cincinnati, there was a young fellow in my class--a great friend of mine. He was poor, and I was poor--God! how poor we were!" Powell paused in this retrospect of poverty. "That was why we were such friends,--our poverty gave us a common interest. This fellow came from up in Hardin County; he was tall, lean and gawky, the worst jay you ever saw. When we had graduated, I supposed he would go home, maybe to Kenton--that was his county-seat. When we were bidding each other good-by--I'll never forget the day, it was June, hot as hell; and we had left the old law school in Walnut Street and were standing there by the Tyler-Davidson fountain in Fifth Street. I said, 'Well, we'll see each other once in a while; we won't be far apart.' He looked at me and said, 'I don't know about that.' 'Why?' I asked. 'Well,' he said, 'I'm going to Chicago.' I looked at him in surprise. He was out at the elbows then, and had hardly enough money to get home on. Then the ridiculousness of it struck me, and I laughed. 'Why, you'll starve to death there!' I said. He only smiled." Powell paused, to whet Marley's appetite, perhaps, for the foregone dénouement. "That jay," Powell said, when he had allowed sufficient time to elapse, "that jay I laughed at is Judge Johnson, of the United States Circuit Court." The story saddened Marley. With his faculty of conceiving a whole drama at once, he caught in an instant the trials Judge Johnson had gone through before he won to his station of ease and honor; he saw the privations, the sacrifices, the hardships, the endless strivings, plottings, schemings; it wearied and depressed him; his frightened mind hung back, clung to the real, the present, the known, found a relief in picturing the seeming security of a man like Wade Powell, in a town where he knew everybody and was known by everybody. He shrank from hearing more of the judge; he wished to stay with his thought in Macochee. "How _do_ young men get a start in places like Macochee?" he asked, and then he added in despairing argument: "They _do_ stay, they _do_ get along somehow, they make livings, and raise families; the town grows and does business, the population increases, it doesn't die off."