"To get to Glenwood, you'd have to pass over right smart of that mire we came through," said Claggett, pensively.
"Then, in Heaven's name, let us go to Josey's," said Vance, laughing, in spite of his bad humor.
They bade farewell to the village, and went off as they had come, Vance choosing to walk, the trooper leading the lame horse.
And now, in defiance of his plight, his melancholy appearance, the accident to his favorite, Vance yielded himself to the spell of a region that became at every moment, as he advanced, more wildly beautiful. The sun, about to set, sent a flood of radiance over hills high and low, over a broken rolling country dominated by the massive shaft of Massanutton Mountain, rising like a tower above his lesser brethren. That the "mile or two further on" stretched into four or five, the young man cared not a jot. His lungs filling with crisp, invigorating air, he strode forward, and was almost sorry when the dormer-windows of an old house shrouded by locust-trees in bloom appeared upon a plateau across intervening fields.
"Now for my best cheek!" he said to himself. "What _am_ I to say to old Josephus? Ask for lodging, like the tramp I look? Hang it! I believe I'll sleep under the nearest haystack, rather!"
While thus absorbed, Mr. Theodore Vance Townsend, the fine flower of various clubs, did not perceive that he was an object of varying interest and solicitude to three persons looking over the fence of a pasture near-by, where cattle were enclosed.
Two elderly gentlemen surveyed him closely. A girl, who had tossed a glance at him over her shoulder, seemed to find more attraction in the Alderney heifer, whose saucy rough tongue was at that moment stretched out to lick salt from a velvet palm, than in the mud-stained wayfarer.
"That's no common tramp," said one of the gentlemen to the other. "If you will stay here with my Lady-love, I'll just go and investigate his case."
Vance Townsend had, perhaps, like other mortals, known his "bad moments" in life. But he felt that there had been few like this, when the old gentleman, issuing through a gate opening from the pasture, came to him with a quick, decided step.
The younger man took off his hat. The older did likewise. And then Vance, between a laugh and a groan, told his story, confirmed by the apparition at that moment, in the distance, of the horses and Claggett, who was himself afoot.