Westover looked after them, and then came forward.  A lank figure of a man at the foot of a poplar, which he had begun to fell, stood waiting him, one hand on his axe-helve and the other on his hip.  There was the scent of freshly smitten bark and sap-wood in the air; the ground was paved with broad, clean chips.

“Good-morning,” said Westover.

“How are you?” returned the other, without moving or making any sign of welcome for a moment.  But then he lifted his axe and struck it into the carf on the tree, and came to meet Westover.

As he advanced he held out his. hand.  “Oh, you’re the one that stopped that fellow that day when he was tryin’ to scare my children.  Well, I thought I should run across you some time.”  He shook hands with Westover, in token of the gratitude which did not express itself in words.  “How are you?  Treat you pretty well up at the Durgins’?  I guess so.  The old woman knows how to cook, anyway.  Jackson’s about the best o’ the lot above ground, though I don’t know as I know very much against the old man, either.  But that boy!  I declare I ‘most feel like takin’ the top of his head off when he gets at his tricks.  Set down.”

Whitwell, as Westover divined the man to be, took a seat himself on a high stump, which suited his length of leg, and courteously waved Westover to a place on the log in front of him.  A long, ragged beard of brown, with lines of gray in it, hung from his chin and mounted well up on his thin cheeks toward his friendly eyes.  His mustache lay sunken on his lip, which had fallen in with the loss of his upper teeth.  From the lower jaw a few incisors showed at this slant and that as he talked.

“Well, well!” he said, with the air of wishing the talk to go on, but without having anything immediately to offer himself.

Westover said, “Thank you,” as he dropped on the log, and Whitwell added, relentingly:  “I don’t suppose a fellow’s so much to blame, if he’s got the devil in him, as what the devil is.”

He referred the point with a twinkle of his eyes to Westover, who said:  “It’s always a question, of course, whether it’s the devil.  It may be original sin with the fellow himself.”

“Well, that’s something so,” said Whitwell, with pleasure in the distinction rather than assent.  “But I guess it ain’t original sin in the boy.  Got it from his gran’father pootty straight, I should say, and maybe the old man had it secondhand.  Ha’d to say just where so much cussedness gits statted.”

“His father’s father?” asked Westover, willing to humor Whitwell’s evident wish to philosophize the Durgins’ history.