“We’ll all turn in and help.  I should think Bill or Jack Kelso could look after the store for a few days,” said the Doctor.  “I promised to take Mr. Traylor over to Jack Kelso’s to-night.  Couldn’t you come along?”

“Good!  We’ll have a story-tellin’ and get Jack to unlimber his guns,” said Abe.

It was a cool evening with a promise of frost in the air.  Jack Kelso’s cabin, one of two which stood close together at the western end of the village, was lighted by the cheery blaze of dry logs in its fireplace.  There were guns on a rack over the fireplace under a buck’s head; a powder horn hanging near them on its string looped over a nail.  There were wolf and deer and bear pelts on the floor.  The skins of foxes, raccoons and wildcats adorned the log walls.  Jack Kelso was a blond, smooth faced, good-looking, merry-hearted Scot, about forty years old, of a rather slight build, some five feet, eight inches tall.  That is all that any one knew of him save that he spent most of his time hunting and fishing and seemed to have all the best things, which great men had said or written, on the tip of his tongue.  He was neatly dressed in a blue flannel coat and shirt, top boots and riding breeches.

“Welcome! and here’s the best seat at the fireside,” he said to Samson.

Then, as he filled his pipe, he quoted the lines from Cymbeline: 

  “’Think us no churls nor measure our good minds
   By this rude place we live in.’

“My wife and daughter are away for a visit and for two days I’ve had the cabin to myself.  Look, ye worshipers of fire, and see how fine it is now!  The homely cabin is a place of beauty.  Everything has the color of the rose, coming and going in the flickering shadows.  What a heaven it is when the flames are leaping!  Here is Hogarth’s line of beauty; nothing perpendicular or horizontal.”

He took Abe’s hand and went on:  “Here, ye lovers of romance, is one of the story-tellers of Ispahan who has in him the wisdom of the wandering tribes.  He can tell you a tale that will draw children from their play and old men from the chimney corner.  My boy, take a chair next to Mr. Traylor.”

He took the hand of the Doctor and added:  “Here, too, is a man whose wit is more famous than his pills—­one produces the shakes and the other cures them.  Doctor, you and I will take the end seats.”

“My pills can be relied upon but my wit is like my dog, away from home most of the time,” said the Doctor.

“Gathering the bones with which you often astonish us,” said Kelso.  “How are the lungs, Doctor?”

“They’re all right.  These long rides in the open are making a new man of me.  Another year in the city would have used me up.”

“Mr. Traylor, you stand up as proud and firm as a big pine,” Kelso remarked.  “I believe you’re a Yankee.”

“So do I,” said Samson.  “If you took all the Yankee out o’ me I’d have an empty skin.”