Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/192



neither won nor lost the cause of the People vs. Gos Augarian; for the jury persisted in their disagreement which divided them at the hour when Calvin Clarke and Joan Daisy Royle utilized the empty court-room to discuss their differences.

After being out for forty hours, the jury reported that a verdict could not be reached; accordingly the judge discharged them and set the case for retrial several weeks later. Since Calvin had no other case on call, he took his vacation in this season which he best loved, late November, when occurred, always in the same week, the Stirring, tumultuous festival of the Harvard-Yale football game and Thanksgiving.

With confident anticipations, he reserved a lower on the Century for Boston and upon the next afternoon he was journeying across northern Indiana on his way home.

Homeland to him meant hills; flatness was the curse of the far country, and Calvin recalled, in comfortable reminiscence, how it had offended him on his first visit. There should be hills, shaded valleys, outcropping stones and rushing brooks, he had thought; and the expanse of the endless plain had seemed to him mere monotony.

He was impatient to see the slopes, the stone fences, the old, white homesteads of Massachusetts, yet the Indiana farms drew his gaze again and again until he let the "Atlantic Monthly" lapse to the seat beside him and sat idly watching the wigwam-like shocks of corn in the fields. They stood in long lines which appeared in diagonal, as the train approached; they shifted to straight right-angles, then rearranged their ranks into disappearing diagonals again as the train rushed away.