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 so fashionable in that day in homes of that sort. An ingrain carpet, flowered with giant roses, showed worn paths between the larger pieces of furniture, like rabbit trails around shocks of fodder in a field. There was an enlargment in black crayon of Mrs. Moore and her husband, in wedding garments, hanging over the organ.

It was an inharmonious array of decorations and furnishings such as delights simple rustic people, quite in keeping with the outward design and color of the house, but altogether rich and grand in Bill Dunham's eyes. He was not at ease in the midst of so much splendor 'and evidence of wealth, for all the kindly questioning by Mrs. Moore on his past life and future intentions. He gave her his uneventful history up to the time of his arrival in Pawnee Bend, grateful from the well of his simple heart that none of them spoke of his encounter with Kellogg, or even hinted at it remotely.

It was impossible that they hadn't heard of it, he knew. Zora had seen MacKinnon, who would have told her the story with trimmings of his own. They kept silent on it, Dunham believed, because they felt instinctively that he would feel the indelicacy of such intrusion.

After a pleasant hour that seemed like a benediction on the straining adventures of his day, Dunham returned to the bunk house to take up, as it appeared to him, the troubles he had put down for this happy interlude. He stretched on the bunk he had occupied last night, to fall into a long train of thought and speculation that dispersed repose like a turmoil before his door.