“Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to school,” said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate, judicial tone.  “There was where he got his head full of nonsense.  What Harve needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas City business college.”

The letters were swimming before Steavens’s eyes.  Was it possible that these men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant nothing to them?  The very name of their town would have remained for ever buried in the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the world in connection with Harvey Merrick’s.  He remembered what his master had said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked his pupil to send his body home.  “It’s not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and doing and bettering,” he had said with a feeble smile, “but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from, in the end.  The townspeople will come in for a look at me; and after they have had their say, I shan’t have much to fear from the judgment of God!”

The cattleman took up the comment.  “Forty’s young for a Merrick to cash in; they usually hang on pretty well.  Probably he helped it along with whisky.”

“His mother’s people were not long lived, and Harvey never had a robust constitution,” said the minister mildly.  He would have liked to say more.  He had been the boy’s Sunday-school teacher, and had been fond of him; but he felt that he was not in a position to speak.  His own sons had turned out badly, and it was not a year since one of them had made his last trip home in the express car, shot in a gambling-house in the Black Hills.

“Nevertheless, there is no disputin’ that Harve frequently looked upon the wine when it was red, also variegated, and it shore made an oncommon fool of him,” moralized the cattleman.

Just then the door leading into the parlour rattled loudly and every one started involuntarily, looking relieved when only Jim Laird came out.  The Grand Army man ducked his head when he saw the spark in his blue, blood-shot eye.  They were all afraid of Jim; he was a drunkard, but he could twist the law to suit his client’s needs as no other man in all western Kansas could do, and there were many who tried.  The lawyer closed the door behind him, leaned back against it and folded his arms, cocking his head a little to one side.  When he assumed this attitude in the court-room, ears were always pricked up, as it usually foretold a flood of withering sarcasm.