"Why do you doubt it?" queried Miss Grierson, neatly flicking a fly from the horse's back with the tip of the whiplash. "Oh, on general principles, I guess. You wouldn't say he had any of the ear-marks of a business man." "What kind of ear-marks has he got?" persisted Miss Grierson--merely to make talk, as Dahlgren decided. "I don't know. We were talking about him around at the club the other night, and Sheffield--he's from Kentucky, you know--thought he remembered the name as the name of a 'moonshine' raider he'd heard of down in his home State." "A moonshine raider? What is that?" By this time Miss Margery's curiosity was less inert than it had been, or had seemed to be, at first. "A deputy marshal, you know; a sort of Government policeman and detective rolled into one. He looks it, don't you think?" Miss Grierson did not say what she thought, then, or later, when she set Dahlgren down at the door of his newspaper office in Sioux Avenue. But still later, two hours later, in fact, she gave a brief audience in the Mereside library to a small, barefooted boy whose occupation was sufficiently indicated by the bundle of evening papers hugged under one arm. "Well, Johnnie; what did you find out?" she asked. "Ain't had time," said the boy. "But he ain't no milyunaire lumber-shooter, I'll bet a nickel. I sold him a pape' jes' now, down by Dutchie's lumber yard, and I ast him what kind o' lumber that was in the pile by the gate. He didn't know, no more'n a goat." Miss Margery filliped a coin in the air and the newsboy caught it dexterously. "That will do nicely for a beginning, Johnnie," she said sweetly. "Come and see me every once in a while, and perhaps there'll be more little white cart-wheels for you. Only don't tell; and don't let him catch you. That's all." XXIV THE FORWARD LIGHT During the days which followed his setting up of the standard of independence in Mrs. Holcomb's second-floor front, Griswold found himself entering upon a new world--a world corresponding with gratifying fidelity to that prefigured future which he had struck out in the waking hours of his first night on the main-deck of the _Belle Julie_. Wahaska, as a fortunate field for the post-graduate course in Experimental Humanity, was all that his fancy had pictured it. It was neither so small as to scant the variety of subjects, nor so large as to preclude the possibility of grasping them in their entirety. In strict accord with the forecast, it promised to afford the writing craftsman's happy medium in surroundings: it would reproduce, in miniature, perhaps, but none the less in just proportions, the social problems of the wider world; and for a writer's seclusion the village quiet of upper Shawnee Street was all that could be desired.