That night Dorothy Harper grew up. For the first time she recognized the call of her adult womanhood which centred about one man and made its own universe. She would not be a child again.
* * *
The town of Lake Erie was no town at all, but a scant cluster of shack-like buildings at the crossing of two roads, which were hardly roads at all, either.
The place had been called Lake Erie when the veterans who had gone to the "War of Twelve" came home from service with Perry—for in no war that the nation has waged has this hermit people failed of response and representation.
This morning it stood as an unsightly detail against a background of impressive beauty. Back of it rose wooded steeps, running the whole lovely gamut of greenery and blossoming colour to a sun-filled sky which was flawless.
The store of Jake Crabbott was open and already possessed of its quorum for the discussion of the day's news.
And to-day there was news! A dozen hickory-shirted and slouch-hatted men lounged against the wall or on empty boxes and broken chairs about its porch and door.
The talk was all of the stranger who had come so recently from Virginia and who had found such a hostile welcome awaiting him. Spice was added to the debate by a realization in the mind of every man who joined in it that the mysterious firer of those shots might be—and probably was—a member of the present conclave.
Jake Crabbott who ran the store maintained, in all neighbourhood differences, the studious attitude of an incorruptible neutral. Old Grandsire Templey, his father-in-law, sat always in the same low chair on the porch in summer and back of the stove in winter, with his palsied hands crossed on his staff-head and his toothless gums mumbling in inconsequential talk.
Old Grandsire was querulous and hazy in his mind but his memory went back almost a century, and it clarified when near events were discarded and he spoke of remoter times.