If the newly-made proprietor had increased in stature, he had not otherwise changed his demeanor.  He remained in the same attitude until the last figure disappeared behind the fringe of buckeye that hid the distant highway.  Then he walked slowly to the fireplace, and, leaning against the chimney, kicked the dying embers together with his foot.  Something dropped and spattered in the film of hot ashes.  Surely the rain had not yet ceased!

His high color had already fled except for a spot on either cheekbone that lent a brightness to his eyes.  He glanced around the cabin.  It looked familiar and yet strange.  Rather, it looked strange because still familiar, and therefore incongruous with the new atmosphere that surrounded it—­discordant with the echo of their last meeting, and painfully accenting the change.  There were the four “bunks,” or sleeping berths, of his companions, each still bearing some traces of the individuality of its late occupant with a dumb loyalty that seemed to make their light-hearted defection monstrous.  In the dead ashes of the Judge’s pipe, scattered on his shelf, still lived his old fire; in the whittled and carved edges of the Left Bower’s bunk still were the memories of bygone days of delicious indolence; in the bullet-holes clustered round a knot of one of the beams there was still the record of the Right Bower’s old-time skill and practice; in the few engravings of female loveliness stuck upon each headboard there were the proofs of their old extravagant devotion—­all a mute protest to the change.

He remembered how, a fatherless, truant schoolboy, he had drifted into their adventurous, nomadic life, itself a life of grown-up truancy like his own, and became one of that gypsy family.  How they had taken the place of relations and household in his boyish fancy, filling it with the unsubstantial pageantry of a child’s play at grown-up existence, he knew only too well.  But how, from being a pet and protege, he had gradually and unconsciously asserted his own individuality and taken upon his younger shoulders not only a poet’s keen appreciation of that life, but its actual responsibilities and half-childish burdens, he never suspected.  He had fondly believed that he was a neophyte in their ways, a novice in their charming faith and indolent creed, and they had encouraged it; now their renunciation of that faith could only be an excuse for a renunciation of him.  The poetry that had for two years invested the material and sometimes even mean details of their existence was too much a part of himself to be lightly dispelled.  The lesson of those ingenuous moralists failed, as such lessons are apt to fail; their discipline provoked but did not subdue; a rising indignation, stirred by a sense of injury, mounted to his cheek and eyes.  It was slow to come, but was none the less violent that it had been preceded by the benumbing shock of shame and pride.