and its effect on chattel security loans.  The real estate agent, an old man with a smiling, hypocritical face, soon joined them.  The coal and lumber dealer and the cattle shipper sat on opposite sides of the hard coal-burner, their feet on the nickel-work.  Steavens took a book from his pocket and began to read.  The talk around him ranged through various topics of local interest while the house was quieting down.  When it was clear that the members of the family were in bed, the Grand Army man hitched his shoulders and, untangling his long legs, caught his heels on the rounds of his chair.

“S’pose there’ll be a will, Phelps?” he queried in his weak falsetto.

The banker laughed disagreeably, and began trimming his nails with a pearl-handled pocket-knife.

“There’ll scarcely be any need for one, will there?” he queried in his turn.

The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again, getting his knees still nearer his chin.  “Why, the ole man says Harve’s done right well lately,” he chirped.

The other banker spoke up.  “I reckon he means by that Harve ain’t asked him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could go on with his education.”

“Seems like my mind don’t reach back to a time when Harve wasn’t bein’ edycated,” tittered the Grand Army man.

There was a general chuckle.  The minister took out his handkerchief and blew his nose sonorously.  Banker Phelps closed his knife with a snap.  “It’s too bad the old man’s sons didn’t turn out better,” he remarked with reflective authority.  “They never hung together.  He spent money enough on Harve to stock a dozen cattle-farms, and he might as well have poured it into Sand Creek.  If Harve had stayed at home and helped nurse what little they had, and gone into stock on the old man’s bottom farm, they might all have been well fixed.  But the old man had to trust everything to tenants and was cheated right and left.”

“Harve never could have handled stock none,” interposed the cattleman.  “He hadn’t it in him to be sharp.  Do you remember when he bought Sander’s mules for eight-year olds, when everybody in town knew that Sander’s father-in-law give ’em to his wife for a wedding present eighteen years before, an’ they was full-grown mules then?”

The company laughed discreetly, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees with a spasm of childish delight.

“Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore was never fond of work,” began the coal and lumber dealer.  “I mind the last time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to the barn helpin’ his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was patchin’ up the fence; Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, in his lady-like voice:  ‘Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.’”

“That’s Harve for you,” approved the Grand Army man.  “I kin hear him howlin’ yet, when he was a big feller in long pants and his mother used to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin’ the cows git foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin’ ’em home from pasture.  He killed a cow of mine that-a-way onct—­a pure Jersey and the best milker I had, an’ the ole man had to put up for her.  Harve, he was watchin’ the sun set acrost the marshes when the anamile got away.”