emotions had then affected this one also--the single feeling
which he had told himself would be eternal; and the old nervous
thrill, so like the thrill of violent love, no longer troubled
him when he chanced to meet his enemy face to face. To-day he
held Will Fletcher absolutely in his hand, he knew; in a few
year's at most his debt to Fletcher would probably be cancelled;
the man and the boy would then be held together by blood ties
like two snarling hounds in the leash--and yet, when all was
said, what would the final outcome yield of satisfaction? As he
put the question he knew that he could meet it only by evasion,
and his inherited apathy enfeebled him even while he demanded an
answer of himself.

As the months went on, his indifference to success or failure
pervaded him like a physical lethargy, and he played his game so
recklessly at last that he sometimes caught himself wondering if
it were, after all, worth a single flicker of the candle. He
still saw Will Fletcher daily; but when the spring came he ceased
consciously, rather from weariness than from any nobler
sentiment, to exert an influence which he felt to be harmful to
the boy. For four years he had wrought tirelessly to compass the
ruin of Fletcher's ambition; and now, when he had but to stretch
forth his arm for the final blow, he admitted impatiently that
what he lacked was the impulsive energy the deed required.

He was still in this mood when, one afternoon in April, as he was
driving his oxen to the store, he met Fletcher in the road behind
the pair of bays. At sight of him the old man's temper slipped
control, and at the end of a few minutes they were quarrelling as
to who should be the one to turn aside.