"Well, now, why can't you take this man along? You can go to the Diggings for Dick, and then"--pointing again at me--"you can drop him at the college and keep on to the station. 'Tain't much out of the way." The driver scanned me closely and answered coldly:-- "Guess his kind don't want to mix in with Dick"--and started for the door. "I have no objection," I answered meekly, "provided I can reach the lecture hall in time." The driver halted, hit the spittoon squarely in the middle, and said with deep earnestness and with a slight trace of deference:-- "Guess you don't know it all, stranger. Dick's served time. Been up twice." "Convict?"--my voice evidently betrayed my surprise. "You've struck it fust time--last trip was for five years." He stood whip in hand, his fur cap pulled over his ears, his eyes fixed on mine, noting the effect of the shot. Every other eye in the room was similarly occupied. I had no desire to walk to Bingville in the cold. I felt, too, the necessity of proving myself up to the customary village standard in courage and complacency. "That don't worry me a bit, my friend. There are a good many of us out of jail that ought to be in, and a good many in that ought to be out." I said this calmly, like a man of wide experience and knowledge of the world, one who had traveled extensively, and whose knowledge of convicts and other shady characters was consequently large and varied. The prehistoric age of this epigram was apparently unnoticed by the driver, for he started forward, grasped my hand, and blurted out in a whole-souled, hearty way, strangely in contrast with his former manner:-- "You ain't so gol-darned stuck up, be ye? Yes, I'll take ye, and glad to." Then he stooped over and laid his hand on my shoulder and said in a softened voice: "When ye git 'longside o' Dick you tell him that; it'll please him," and he stalked out and shut the door behind him. Another dead silence fell upon the group. Then a citizen on the other side of the stove, by the aid of his elbows, lifted himself perpendicularly, unhooked a coat from a peg, and remarked to himself in a tone that expressed supreme disgust:-- "Please him! In a pig's eye it will," and disappeared into the night. Only two loungers were now left--the butternut man with the sinister expression, and the red-faced man with the dyed mustache. The landlord for the second time dropped into a chair beside me. "I knowed Dick was out, but I didn't say nothing, so many of these fellers 'round here is down on him. The night his time was up Dick come in here on his way home and asked after his mother. He hadn't heard from her for a month, and was nigh worried to death about her. I told him she was all right, and had him in to dinner. He'd fleshed up a bit and nobody didn't catch on who he was,--bein' away nigh five years,--and so I passed him off for a drummer."