Pleasantville’s weekly paper, The Genius of Liberty, had dwelt at length upon those distinguished services judge Slocum Price had rendered the nation in war and peace, the judge having graciously furnished an array of facts otherwise difficult of access.  That he was drunk at the time had but added to the splendor of the narrative.  He had placed his ripe wisdom, the talents he had so assiduously cultivated, at the services of his fellow citizens.  He was prepared to represent them in any or all the courts.  But he had remained undisturbed in his condition of preparedness; that erudite brain was unconcerned with any problem beyond financing his thirst at the tavern, where presently ingenuity, though it expressed itself with a silver tongue, failed him, and he realized that the river’s spent floods had left him stranded with those other odds and ends of worthless drift that cumbered its sun-scorched mud banks.

Something of all this passed through his mind as he sat there sodden and dreamy, with the one fierce need of his nature quieted for the moment.  He had been stranded before, many times, in those long years during which he had moved steadily toward a diminishing heritage; indeed, nothing that was evil could contain the shock of a new experience.  He had fought and lost all his battles—­bitter struggles to think of even now, after the lapse of years, and the little he had to tell of himself was an intricate mingling of truth and falsehood, grotesque exaggeration, purposeless mendacity.

He and Mahaffy had met exactly one month before, on the deck of the steamer from which they had been put ashore at the river landing two miles from Pleasantville.  Mahaffy’s historic era had begun just there.  Apparently he had no past of which he could be brought to speak.  He admitted having been born in Boston some sixty years before, and was a printer by trade; further than this, he had not revealed himself, drunk or sober.

At the judge’s elbow Mr. Mahaffy changed his position with nervous suddenness.  Then he folded his long arms.

“You asked if there was any news, Price; while we were waiting for the boat a raft tied up to the bank; the fellow aboard of it had a man he’d fished up out of the river, a man who’d been pretty well cut to pieces.”

“Who was he?” asked the judge.

“Nobody knew, and he wasn’t conscious.  I shouldn’t be surprised if he never opens his lips again.  When the doctor had looked to his cuts, the fellow on the raft cast off and went on down the Elk.”

It occurred to the judge that he himself had news to impart.  He must account for the boy’s presence.

“While you’ve been taking your whiff of life down at the steamboat landing, Mahaffy, I’ve been experiencing a most extraordinary coincidence.”  The judge paused.  By a sullen glare in his deep-sunk eyes Mr. Mahaffy seemed to bid him go on.  “Back east—­” the judge jerked his thumb with an indefinite gesture “back east at my ancestral home—­” Mahaffy snorted harshly.  “You don’t believe I had an ancestral home?—­well, I had!  It was of brick, sir, with eight Corinthian columns across the front, having a spacious paneled hall sixty feet long.  I had the distinguished honor to entertain General Andrew Jackson there.”