"Perhaps I am. But I see the boys are here with the horses. Let's be off and away, forgetting philosophy and girls and pessimism and moonlight and molasses candy for a time at least. Is that a quarter of shoat Cilla is toting from the ice-house? In verity it is, and a decent respect for its succulent attractiveness should prompt us to arm ourselves and meet it with an appetite. So here goes for a good hard gallop, with stiff fences by the way." XXVIII THE EVENTS OF A DAY Only once had Westover been interrupted during his hours of laborious and futile effort to write his letter to Colonel Conway. Jack Towns, being an ideal guest, had occupied himself with books, strolls, and other silent means of passing the time, so that his host had been in no way reminded of his existence. But the weather had not been so unobtrusive a guest. Considerably before noon there came a squall which for ten or fifteen minutes threatened destruction to everything movable about the place. It unroofed a cellar door at the back of the house. It carried away the shed of a tobacco barn, and curiously enough one of the cook's pigs, which she was bringing up luxuriously on "pot liquor and kitchen stuff," disappeared during the brief hurricane. Whether the obese porker was really blown away, as most of the house servants stoutly contended, or whether it was that some colored person with an appetite had simultaneously seized the opportunity and the pig and got away with both, was a point never accurately determined. Boyd Westover cared nothing for damages that might be repaired, but he was sorely distressed by the wreckage of a favorite mimosa tree that flourished near one corner of the porch. He even quitted his writing, when the little squall had passed away, and with Jack Towns's very inexpert assistance, attempted some repairs. But when there arose the question of sawing off a broken limb, he abandoned the undertaking, saying: "We'll leave that till Carley Farnsworth comes. He's due here to-day to see some of my people who are ill. He's a much better horticulturist than either of us, Jack, and besides he's a surgeon and will know better how to give the poor tree a chance to grow into symmetry again." Then, as he sorrowfully contemplated the torn and broken mimosa, he muttered: "I shouldn't have cared half so much if the squall had blown away every barn I've got. The ruin of that tree is all that it means to me." He little dreamed what other and immeasurably greater consequences were to come to him as the result of that brief atmospheric disturbance, but he was destined, after a time, to find out.