In Antioch, Oakley was something of a figure. He was the first manager of the road to make the town his permanent headquarters, and the town was grateful. It would have swamped him with kindly attention, but he had studiously ignored all advances, preferring not to make friends. In this he had not entirely succeeded. The richest man in the county, Dr. Emory, who was a good deal of a patrician, had taken a fancy to him, and had insisted upon entertaining him at a formal dinner, at which there were present the Methodist minister, the editor of the local paper, the principal merchant, a judge, and an ex-Congressman, who went to sleep with the soup and only wakened in season for the ice-cream. It was the most impressive function Oakley had ever attended, and even to think of it still sent the cold chills coursing down his spine. That morning he had chanced to meet Dr. Emory on the street, and the doctor, who could always be trusted to say exactly what he thought, had taken him to task for not calling. There was a reason why Oakley had not done so. The doctor's daughter had just returned from the East, and vague rumors were current concerning her beauty and elegance. Now, women were altogether beyond Oakley's ken. However, since some responsive courtesy was evidently expected of him, he determined to have it over with at once. Imbued with this idea, he went to his room after supper to dress. As he arrayed himself for the ordeal, he sought to recall a past experience in line with the present. Barring the recent dinner, his most ambitious social experiment had been a brakesmen's ball in Denver, years before, when he was conductor on a freight. He laughed softly as he fastened his tie. “I wonder what Dr. Emory would think if I told him I'd punched a fellow at a dance once because he wanted to take my girl away from me.” He recalled, as pointing his innate conservatism, that he had decided not to repeat the experiment until he achieved a position where a glittering social success was not contingent upon his ability to punch heads. It was still raining, a discouragingly persistent drizzle, when Oakley left his hotel and turned from the public square into Main Street. This Main Street was never an imposing thoroughfare, and a week of steady downpour made it from curb to curb a river of quaking mud. It was lit at long intervals by flickering gas-lamps that glowed like corpulent fireflies in the misty darkness beneath the dripping maple-boughs. As in the case of most Western towns, Antioch had known dreams of greatness, dreams which had not been realized. It stood stockstill, in all its raw, ugly youth, with the rigid angularity its founders had imposed upon it when they hacked and hewed a spot for it in the pine-woods, whose stunted second growth encircled it on every side.