Dakie Thayne flushed up, hot, without a word, when he came out, an instant after.
"I'm so sorry!" said Leslie, with real regret, accented with honest indignation.
"It's your place," called out a rough man, who made the third upon the coach-box. "Why don't you stick up for it?"
The color went down slowly in the boy's face, and a pride came up in his eye. He put his hand to his cap, with a little irony of deference, and lifted it off with the grace of a grown man. "I know it's my place. But the young lady may keep it—now. I'd rather be a gentleman!" said Dakie Thayne.
"You've got the best of it!" This came from Marmaduke Wharne, as the door closed upon the boy, and the stage rolled down the road toward Cherry Mountain.
There is a "best" to be got out of everything; but it is neither the best of place or possession, nor the chuckle of the last word.
CHAPTER VII.
DOWN AT OUTLEDGE.
Among the mountains, somewhere between the Androscoggin and the Saco,—I don't feel bound to tell you precisely where, and I have only a story-teller's word to give you for it at all,—lies the little neighborhood of Outledge. An odd corner of a great township such as they measure off in these wilds; where they take in, with some eligible "locations" of intervale land, miles also of pathless forest where the bear and the moose are wandering still, a pond, perhaps, filling up a basin of acres and acres in extent, and a good-sized mountain or two, thrown in to keep off the north wind; a corner cut off, as its name indicates, by the outrunning of a precipitous ridge of granite, round which a handful of population had crept and built itself a group of dwellings,—this was the spot discovered and seized to themselves some four or five years since by certain migratory pioneers of fashion.