“Yes, I did get your letter.  I didn’t give no letter o’ yours to her.  And I didn’t answer your letter before, for I didn’t propose to answer it at all.”

“Why?” demanded Brice indignantly.

“I didn’t give her your letter because I didn’t kalkilate to be any go-between ’twixt you and Snapshot Harry’s niece.  Look yar, Mr. Brice.  Sense I read that ’ar paragraph in that paper you gave me, I allowed to myself that it wasn’t the square thing for me to have any more doin’s with him, and I quit it.  I jest chucked your letter in the fire.  I didn’t answer you because I reckoned I’d no call to correspond with ye, and when I showed ye that trail over to Harry’s camp, it was ended.  I’ve got a house and business to look arter, and it don’t jibe with keepin’ company with ‘road agents.’  That’s what I got outer that paper you gave me, Mr. Brice.”

Rage and disgust filled Brice at the man’s utter selfishness and shameless desertion of his kindred, none the less powerfully that he remembered the part he himself had played in concocting the paragraph.  “Do you mean to say,” he demanded passionately, “that for the sake of that foolish paragraph you gave up your own kindred?  That you truckled to the mean prejudices of your neighbors and kept that poor, defenseless girl from the only honest roof she could find refuge under?  That you dared to destroy my letter to her, and made her believe I was as selfish and ungrateful as yourself?”

“Young feller,” said Mr. Tarbox still more deliberately, yet with a certain dignity that Brice had never noticed before, “what’s between you and Flo, and what rights she has fer thinkin’ ye ‘ez selfish’ and ’ez ongrateful’ ez me—­ef she does, I dunno!—­but when ye talk o’ me givin’ up my kindred, and sling such hogwash ez ‘ongrateful’ and ‘selfish’ round this yer sittin’-room, mebbe it mout occur to ye that Harry Dimwood might hev his opinion o’ what was ‘ongrateful’ and ‘selfish’ ef I’d played in between his niece and a young man o’ the express company, his nat’ral enemy.  It’s one thing to hev helped ye to see her in her uncle’s own camp, but another to help ye by makin’ a clandecent post-offis o’ my cabin.  Ef, instead o’ writin’, you’d hev posted yourself by comin’ to me, you mout hev found out that when I broke with Harry I offered to take Flo with me for good and all—­ef he’d keep away from us.  And that’s the kind o’ ‘honest roof’ that that thar ’poor defenseless girl’ got under when her crippled mother died three weeks ago, and left Harry free.  It was by ‘trucklin’’ to them ’mean prejudices,’ and readin’ that thar ‘foolish paragraph,’ that I settled this thing then and thar!”

Brice’s revulsion of sentiment was so complete, and the gratitude that beamed in his eyes was so sincere, that Mr. Tarbox hardly needed the profuse apologies which broke from him.  “Forgive me!” he continued to stammer, “I have wronged you, wronged her—­everybody.  But as you know, Mr. Tarbox, how I have felt over this, how deeply—­how passionately”—­