The Honourable Hilary grunted, and sat down on a bucket and carefully prepared a piece of Honey Dew.  He was surprised and agitated.

“Then why are you a fugitive from justice if you were acting in self-defence?” he inquired.

“Well, you see there were no witnesses, except a Mexican of Blodgett’s, and Blodgett runs the Pepper County machine for the railroad out there.  I’d been wanting to come East and have a look at you for some time, and I thought I might as well come now.”

“How did this—­this affair start?” asked Mr. Vane.

“Blodgett was driving in some of Tyner’s calves, and I caught him.  I told him what I thought of him, and he shot at me through his pocket.  That was all.”

“All!  You shot him, didn’t you?”

“I was lucky enough to hit him first,” said Austen.

Extraordinary as it may seem, the Honourable Hilary experienced a sense of pride.

“Where did you hit him?” he asked.

It was Euphrasia who took matters in her own hands and killed the fatted calf, and the meal to which they presently sat down was very different from the frugal suppers Mr. Vane usually had.  But he made no comment.  It is perhaps not too much to say that he would have been distinctly disappointed had it been otherwise.  There was Austen’s favourite pie, and Austen’s favourite cake, all inherited from the Austens, who had thought more of the fleshpots than people should.  And the prodigal did full justice to the occasion.

CHAPTER III

CONCERNING THE PRACTICE OF LAW

So instinctively do we hark back to the primeval man that there was a tendency to lionize the prodigal in Ripton, which proves the finished civilization of the East not to be so far removed from that land of outlaws, Pepper County.  Mr. Paul Pardriff, who had a guilty conscience about the clipping, and vividly bearing in mind Mr. Blodgett’s mishap, alone avoided young Mr. Vane; and escaped through the type-setting room and down an outside stairway in the rear when that gentleman called.  It gave an ironical turn to the incident that Mr. Pardriff was at the moment engaged in a “Welcome Home” paragraph meant to be propitiatory.

Austen cared very little for lionizing.  He spent most of his time with young Tom Gaylord, now his father’s right-hand man in a tremendous lumber business.  And Tom, albeit he had become so important, habitually fell once more under the domination of the hero of his youthful days.  Together these two visited haunts of their boyhood, camping and fishing and scaling mountains, Tom with an eye to lumbering prospects the while.

After a matter of two or three months bad passed away in this pleasant though unprofitable manner, the Honourable Hilary requested the presence of his son one morning at his office.  This office was in what had once been a large residence, and from its ample windows you could look out through the elms on to the square.  Old-fashioned bookcases lined with musty books filled the walls, except where a steel engraving of a legal light or a railroad map of the State was hung, and the Honourable Hilary sat in a Windsor chair at a mahogany table in the middle.