“He’ll be enough sight sorrier if I smash his face! Who is he, anyhow? A scrub pup from his fine ol’ daddy’s breed! He was fired from college--for cheatin’, too. He’s a sneak now. You know as well as me that ever’ Saturday he sends that wife of hisn to visit her folks across the river, then sneaks off to town hisself an’ has a good time on the sly. Only las’ Sunday, when that poker club in town was pulled, he was one of the men they caught. Oh, he hushed it up, him an’ his town friends, but he was one. I know, Bill. Jim Ryan, he’s my friend, he’s one of the cops that done it. He come out here to hunt with me las’ Tuesday, an’ he tol’ me about it. I never opened my mouth about it to nobody--I never would have, either. But let me go now, an’ I’ll face him with it. I’ll tell him--” “No, no,” said Carson kindly, with the indulgence of the strong. “There’s a woman in there, Sam Raine’s wife. You don’t want to raise a row befo’ her, do you? You’ll be justifyin’ what Frank said. Go on home now, ol’ man, an’ go to bed.” * * * * * And in humiliation and sorrow old Jeff went--went because there wasn’t anything else for him to do. Anger is a violent intoxicant: you forget your troubles while the rage lasts, you do not care for past or future. Old Jeff Potter would have been happier this night if he could have stayed angry. But sitting late into the night by the smoky lamp on the table, he had forgotten his anger, he had forgotten everything except that he couldn’t go to the store any more. He had loved it in the old days when Sam Blainey, dead now, ran it, and the lazier men of a lazier era gathered around the rusty, pot-bellied stove. Then he had come to love the new régime, after Frank painted the store all over inside and out; he had loved the bright acetylene lights and the shiny new base-burner, and the Saturday night crowds. He didn’t ask much of life, he never had--just a roof over his head, a place to hunt, a store to loaf in, where he could see men and women and children and hear them talk. And now one of these, the one that was growing dearer as he grew older, had been taken away. For a moment the old man’s helpless anger flared up like an echo. “I ought to have smashed his face!” he muttered. But when he rose and fumbled about on the mantelpiece, among bits of soft pine and half carved Indians, for his pipe, his hands were trembling, and so was the match he held to the bowl; while outside the rain, ever increasing, splashed from the eaves and dashed against the window, as if his cabin were some sub-sea shelter in the midst of a roaring ocean.