Now he had come!  The chair there was empty.  So it would always be.  But here I should always be with my pipe and my crutches, and the dogs snuggling by the fire.

Tim had come!  The clock hands were crawling on and on.  His minute had better end.  I hurled my pipe into the smouldering coals; I tossed a crutch at little Colonel, and the dog ran howling from the room.  Old Captain sat up on his haunches, his slantwise eyes wide open with wonder.

Aye, Captain, men are strange creatures.  Their moods will change with every clock-tick.  One moment your master sits smoking and watching the flames—­the next he is tearing hatless from the house; and it is cold outside and the wind in the chimney is tumbling down the soot.  When the wind sings like that in the chimney, it is sweeping full and sharp down the village street, and across the flats by the graveyard, whither he goes hobbling.

Little Colonel comes cautiously into the room, hugging the wall till he is back at the fireside.  With his head between his fore-paws and one eye closed, he watches the tiny tongue of flame licking up the last coal.  There are worse lives than a dog’s.

XVI

Tim came whistling down the road.  He whistled full and clear, and while he was still at the turn of the hill the wind brought me a bit of his rollicking tune as I huddled on the school-house steps, waiting.  The world was going well with him.  He had all that the wise count good; he was winning what the foolish count better.  With head high and swinging arms he came on, the beat of his feet on the hard road keeping time to his gay whistling.  Tim was winning in the game.  While his brother was droning over the reader and the spelling-book with two-score leather-headed children, he was fighting his way upward in the world of commerce.  While his brother was wringing a living from a few acres of niggardly soil and a little school, he was on the road to riches; while his brother was wrangling with the worthies of the store over the momentous problems of the day, he was where those problems were being worked out and standing by the men who were solving them.  All in this world worth having was Tim’s, and now even what was his brother’s he had taken.  To him that hath!  From him that hath not!  He had all.  I had nothing.  Now as he came swinging on so carelessly, I knew that I had lost even him.

Never once had there come to my mind the thought of doing my brother any bodily harm.  My emotions were too conflicting for me to know just why I had come at all into the night to meet him.  Now it was against him that the violence of my anger would vent itself.  Now it was against myself, and I cursed myself for an idle, dreaming fool.  Then came over me, overwhelming me, a sense of my own utter loneliness, and against it Tim stood out so bold and clear-cut and strong; that I felt myself crying out