“It’s your place,” called out a rough man, who made the third upon the coach-box.  “Why don’t you stick up for it?”

The color went down slowly in the boy’s face, and a pride came up in his eye.  He put his hand to his cap, with a little irony of deference, and lifted it off with the grace of a grown man.  “I know it’s my place.  But the young lady may keep it—­now. I’d rather be a gentleman!” said Dakie Thayne.

“You’ve got the best of it!” This came from Marmaduke Wharne, as the door closed upon the boy, and the stage rolled down the road toward Cherry Mountain.

There is a “best” to be got out of everything; but it is neither the best of place or possession, nor the chuckle of the last word.

CHAPTER VII.

DOWN AT OUTLEDGE.

Among the mountains, somewhere between the Androscoggin and the Saco,—­I don’t feel bound to tell you precisely where, and I have only a story-teller’s word to give you for it at all,—­lies the little neighborhood of Outledge.  An odd corner of a great township such as they measure off in these wilds; where they take in, with some eligible “locations” of intervale land, miles also of pathless forest where the bear and the moose are wandering still, a pond, perhaps, filling up a basin of acres and acres in extent, and a good-sized mountain or two, thrown in to keep off the north wind; a corner cut off, as its name indicates, by the outrunning of a precipitous ridge of granite, round which a handful of population had crept and built itself a group of dwellings,—­this was the spot discovered and seized to themselves some four or five years since by certain migratory pioneers of fashion.

An old two-story farmhouse, with four plain rooms of generous dimensions on each floor, in which the first delighted summer party had divided itself, glad and grateful to occupy them double and even treble bedded, had become the “hotel,” with a name up across the gable of the new wing,—­“Giant’s Cairn House,”—­and the eight original rooms made into fourteen.  The wing was clapped on by its middle; rushing out at the front toward the road to meet the summer tide of travel as it should surge by, and hold up to it, arrestively, its titular sign-board; the other half as expressively making its bee-line toward the river and the mountain view at back,—­just as each fresh arrival, seeking out the preferable rooms, inevitably did.  Behind, upon the other side, an L provided new kitchens; and over these, within a year, had been carried up a second story, with a hall for dancing, tableaux, theatricals, and traveling jugglers.

Up to this hostelry whirled daily, from the southward, the great six-horse stage; and from the northward came thrice a week wagons or coaches “through the hills,” besides such “extras” as might drive down at any hour of day or night.