The drive in the open air was sufficiently tonic to help him through the details of ticket-buying and embarkation; and afterward sleep came so quickly that he did not know when the Pullman porter drew the curtains to adjust the screen in the window at his feet, though he did awake drowsily later on at the sound of voices in the aisle, awoke to realize vaguely that his two table companions of the Hotel Chouteau cafe were to be his fellow travellers in the Pullman. The train was made up ready to leave, and the locomotive was filling the great train-shed with stertorous hissings, when a red-faced man slipped through the gates to saunter over to the Pullman and to peck inquisitively at the porter. "Much of a load to-night, George?" "No, sah; mighty light: four young ladies goin' up to de school in Faribault, Mistah Grierson and his daughter, and a gentleman from de Chouteau." "A gentleman from the Chouteau? When did he come down?" The porter knew the calling of the red-faced man only by intuition; but Griswold's tip was warming in his pocket and he lied at random and on general principles. "Been heah all de evenin'; come down right early afte' suppeh, and went to baid like he was sick or tarr'd or somethin'." "What sort of a looking man is he?" "Little, smooth-faced, narr'-chisted gentleman; look like he might be----" But the train was moving out and the red-faced man had turned away. Whereupon the porter broke his simile in the midst, picked up his carpet-covered step, and climbed aboard. XV THE GOTHS AND VANDALS In the day of its beginnings, Wahaska was a minor trading-post on the north-western frontier, and an outfitting station for the hunters and trappers of the upper Mississippi and Minnesota lake region. Later, it became the market town of a wheat-growing district, and a foundation of modest prosperity was laid by well-to-do farmers gravitating to their county seat to give their children the benefit of a graded school. Later still came the passing of the wheat, a re-peopling of the farms by a fresh influx of home-seekers from the Old World, and the birth, in Wahaska and elsewhere, of the industrial era. Jasper Grierson was a product of the wheat-growing period. The son of one of the earliest of the New-York-State homesteaders in the wheat belt, he came of age in the year of the Civil War draft, and was unpatriotic enough, some said, to dodge conscription, or the chance of it, by throwing up his hostler's job in a Wahaska livery stable and vanishing into the dim limbo of the Farther West. Also, tradition added that he was well-spared by most; that he was ill-spared, indeed, by only one, and that one a woman.