Sometimes the experiences of the last few years took on the semblance of a haunting dream; those long marches through a land rich with strange foliage and fruits, the enchanted Southern nights, the life in camp, the roar of battle, and that one bewildering day on the heights of Chapultepec—­it all seemed phantasmagoric.  But there was his mutilation to assure him of the reality, and there on Anchor Street, growing grayer and more wrinkled every season, stood the little building where he had enlisted.  To be sure, the shield was gone from the transom, and the spiders had stretched their reticulated barricades across the entrance; but whenever Dutton hobbled by the place, he could almost see Sergeant O’Neil leaning in an insidious attitude against the door-sill, and smoking his short clay pipe as of old.  Yet as time elapsed, this figure also grew indistinct and elusive, like the rest.  Possibly—­but this is the merest conjecture, and has bearing only on a later period—­possibly it may have sometimes occurred to James Dutton, in a vague way, that after all there had been something ironical and sinister in his good fortune.  The very circumstance that had lifted him from his obscurity had shut him out from further usefulness in life; his one success had defeated him; he was stranded, and could do no more.  If such a reflection ever came to him, no expression of it found a way to his lips.

The weeks turned themselves into months, and the months into years.  Perhaps four years had passed by when clouds of a perceptible density began to gather on James Dutton’s bright horizon.

The wisest of poets has told us that custom dulls the edge of appetite.  One gets used to everything, even to heroes.  James Dutton was beginning to lose the bloom of his novelty.  Indeed, he had already lost it.  The process had been so gradual, so subtile, in its working, that the final result came upon him like something that had happened suddenly.  But this was not the fact.  He might have seen it coming, if he had watched.  One by one his customers had drifted away from him; his shop was out of the beaten track, and a fashionable boot and shoe establishment, newly sprung up in the business part of the town, had quietly absorbed his patrons.  There was no conscious unkindness in this desertion.  Thoughtless neglect, all the more bitter by contrast, had followed thoughtless admiration.  Admiration and neglect are apt to hunt in couples.  Nearly all the customers left on Dutton’s hands had resolved themselves into two collateral classes, those who delayed and those who forgot to pay.  That unreached pension, which flitted like an ignis fatuus the instant one got anywhere near it, would have been very handy to have just then.  The want of it had come long before old age.  Dutton was only twenty-nine.  Yet he somehow seemed old.  The indoor confinement explained his pallor, but not the deepening lines that recently began to spread themselves fan-like at the corners of his eyes.