forgot the peril of it, in his wrath; he hated injustice. Only the yellow dog followed at his heels and his heart was full of strange thoughts. Five years of isolation and injustice must tell in a man’s life, and the purposes born there in solitude are grim. The great trial that was to divide Eshcol against itself was growing, growing out of the sweet spring twilight, growing[22] beyond the song of the thrush and the cheep of the woodpecker, growing in the heart of a man.

[22]

Meanwhile, Jacob Eaton had called Trench the father of Jean Bartlett’s child, and old Scipio, who drove the colonel’s bays, heard it and told it to Kingdom-Come Carter, who had been butler at Broad Acres for fifty years, and had carried Diana in his arms when she was two weeks old. Kingdom-Come told it to Aunt Charity and Uncle Juniper, coal-black negroes of the cabin, and thus by kitchens and alley-doors the story traveled, as a needle will travel through the body and work its way to the surface. The reputation of a man is but the breath on a servant’s lips, as man himself is compared to grass and the flower of it.

[23]

III

TRENCH walked slowly homeward. Colonel Royall’s place, the largest of its kind in the neighborhood of Eshcol, was on a hill above the town, and Trench’s nearest path lay not by the highroad but past the Colonel’s gates along a lovely trail that led through a growth of stunted cedars out into the open ground above the river, and thence by a solitary and wooded path known sometimes as the Trail of the Cedar-bird, because those little birds haunted it at certain seasons of the year.

It was now broad moonlight, and Trench, who was peculiarly susceptible to the sights and sounds of Nature, was aware of the beauty of every tremulous shadow. The chill spring air was sweet with the aromatic perfume of pines and cedars, and, as he turned the shoulder of the hill, his eye swept the new-plowed fields. He could smell the grapevines that were blooming in masses by the wayside, promising a full harvest of those great purple grapes that had given the settlement its name. Below him the river forked, and in its elbow nestled the center of the village, the church at the Cross-Roads, and the little red schoolhouse where Peter Mahan had fought Jacob Eaton and whipped him at the age of twelve, long before[24] Caleb Trench had even heard of Eshcol. To the left was the Friends’ Meeting-House, Judge Hollis’ home, and the lane which led to Trench’s shop and office. Beyond, he discerned the little old 

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