“I can’t git up them stairs and I’d like to look at it agin,” he said, and when Jeff brought it and stood it before him tears ran down his cheeks like rain. “It makes me think of the time when I was young, and Dotty, too. The lalocks in the garden was blowin’ and the apple trees was blossomin’ the day it was sot up. I can smell the lalocks yet, though the bush has been dead many a year just as Dotty is. Take it away, Jeff, and you needn’t bring it agin. I’m done with Taylor’s Tarvern, and with everything else but you!” Jeff took it back and felt the moisture in his own eyes at his master’s reminiscences of a past which could never return. To the villagers Jeff was very reticent with regard to his western life. Of his change of name he made light. It was a fashion with some of the miners and he foolishly followed it, he said, but of what befel Tom Hardy he said very little. He was, however, paying so heavy a penalty for his misdeeds that he sometimes felt as if he must hide where no one had ever heard of him in connection with Long John and Little Dick. Fanny had told of the hold up of which he had been the hero, and of the other where he had been an actor, and it seemed to him people would never stop questioning him as to the most minute details. If he repeated the story once in the office he repeated it a hundred times to a breathless audience which never grew tired of listening and were always ready to hear it again. “And they never got a clew to them, you say?” “Never,” was the question and answer, with which the evening usually closed, the people dispersing to their rooms or homes, while Jeff rushed out into the night overwhelmed with remorse. “I believe State’s Prison would be better than this,” he sometimes thought when Uncle Zacheus had him on the rack. He was inexorable and made Jeff tell the story over and over again until he ought to have known it by heart. Once when he was out for his airing he asked, speaking of the robbers, “Be they gone, root and branch?” “Yes, root and branch. Neither Long John nor Little Dick have been seen since Inez died,” Jeff replied. It was not often that he spoke of Inez, and now at the mention of her name Uncle Zach rejoined, “Poor girl, and you was to have married her. I am sorry for you. And she was Miss Mason’s sister and Mark was her father. Mark was a likely chap. I’ve nothing agin him except that he run away and let ’em think he was dead and changed his name. I s’pose he put you up to change yours, too.” “No, he didn’t,” Jeff answered quickly. “It was right the other way. I put him up to every bad thing he ever did.” Jeff was a little heated in his defense of Mark and pushed the chair over a rough place with less care than usual. “Soffly, soffly, Jeff. My bones is older than they was once,” Uncle Zach said.