Luck had come at last to the Ferris farm. Link's cash went into improvements on the place, instead of going into the deteriorating of his inner man. And he worked the better. A sulky man is ever prone to be an inefficient man. And Link no longer sulked.
All this-combined with a wholesale boom in local agriculture, and especially in truck gardening--had wrought wonders in Link's farm and in Link's bank account. Within three years of Ferris's meeting with Chum the place's last mortgage was wiped out and a score of needed repairs and improvements were installed. Also the man had a small but steadily growing sum to his credit in a Paterson savings bank.
Life on the farm was mighty pleasant, nowadays. Work was hard, of course, but it was bringing results that made it more than worth while. Ferris and his dog were living on the fat of the land. And they were happy.
Then came the interruption that had been inevitable from the very first.
A taciturn and eternally dead-broke man, in a rural region, need not fear intrusion on his privacy. Convivial folk make detours round him, as if he were a mud puddle. Thriftier and more respectable neighbors eye him askance or eye him not at all.
But when a meed of permanent success comes to such a man he need no longer be lonely unless he so wills. Which is not cynicism, but common sense. The convivial element will still fight shy of him. But he is welcomed into the circle of the respectable.
So it was with Link Ferris. Of old he had been known as a shiftless and harddrinking mountaineer with a sour farm that was plastered with mortgages. Now, he had cleared off his mortgages and had cleaned up his farm; and he and his home exuded an increasing prosperity.
People, meeting him in the nearby village of Hampton or at church, began to treat him with a consideration that the long-aloof farmer found bewildering.
Yet he liked it rather than not; being at heart a gregarious soul. And with gruff friendliness he met the advances of well-to-do neighbors who in old days had scarce favored him with a nod.
The gradual change from the isolated life of former years did not make any sort of a hit with Chum. The collie had been well content to wander through the day's work at his master's heels;to bring in the sheep and the cattle from pasture; to guard the farm from intruders--human or otherwise.
In the evenings it had been sweet to lounge at Link's feet, on the little white porch, in the summer dusk; or to lie in drowsy content in front of the glowing kitchen stove on icy nights when the gale screeched through the naked boughs of the dooryard trees and the snow scratched hungrily at the window panes.
Now, the dog's sensitive brain was aware of a subtle alteration.
He did not object very much to the occasional visits at the house of other farmers and townsfolk during the erstwhile quiet evenings, although he had been happier in the years of peaceful seclusion.
But he grieved at his master's increasingly frequent absences from home. Nowadays, once or twice a week, Link was wont to dress himself in his best as soon as the day's work was done, and fare forth to Hampton for the evening.
Sometimes he let Chum go with him in these outings. Oftener of late he had said, as he started out:
"Not to-night, Chummie. Stay here."
Obediently the big dog would lay himself down with a sigh on the porch edge; his head between his white little forepaws; his sorrowful brown eyes following the progress of his master down the lane to the highroad.
But he grieved, as only a sensitive highbred dog can grieve--a dog who asks nothing better of life than permission to live and to die at the side of the man he has chosen as his god; to follow that god out into rain or chill; to starve with him, if need be;to suffer at his hands--in short, to do or to be anything except to be separated from him.
Link Ferris had gotten into the habit of leaving Chum alone at home, oftener and oftener of late, as his own evening absences from the farm grew more and more frequent.
He left Chum at home because She did not like dogs.
"She" was Dorcas Chatham, the daughter of Hampton's postmaster and general storekeeper.
Old Man Chatham in former days would have welcomed Cal Whitson, the official village souse, to his home as readily as he would have admitted the ne'er-do-well Link Ferris to that sanctuary.
But of late he had noted the growing improvement in Link's fortunes, as evidenced by his larger store trade, his invariable cash payments and the frequent money orders which went in his name to the Paterson savings bank.
Wherefore, when Dorcas met Link at a church sociable and again on a straw ride and asked him to come and see her some time, her sire made no objection. Indeed he welcomed the bashful caller with something like an approach to cordiality.
Dorcas was a calm-eyed, efficient damsel, more than a little pretty, and with much repose of manner. Link Ferris, from the first, eyed her with a certain awe. When a mystic growing attraction was added to this and when it in turn merged into love, the sense of awe was not lost. Rather it was strengthened.
In all his thirty-one lean and lonely years Link had never before fallen in love. At the age when most youths are sighing over some wonder girl, he had been too busy fighting off bankruptcy and starvation to have time or thought for such things.
Wherefore, when love at last smote him it smote him hard. And it found him woefully unprepared for the battle.
He knew nothing of women. He did not know, for example, what the average youth finds out in his teens--that grave eyes and silent aloofness and lofty self-will and icy pietism in a maiden do not always signify that she is a saint and that she must be worshiped as such. Ferris had no one to tell him that far oftener these signs point merely to stupid narrowness and to lack of ideas.
Dorcas was clever at housework. She was quietly self-assured. She was good to look upon. She was not like any of the few girls Link had met. Wherefore he built for her a sacred shrine in his innermost heart; and he knelt before her image there.
