A Damaged Reputation by Harold Bindloss

There was a portentous quietness in the little wooden town which did not exactly please Mr. Faraday Slocum, the somewhat discredited local agent of Grant Devine, as he ascended the steep street from the grocery store. The pines closed in upon it, but their sombre spires were growing dim, and the white mists clung about them, for dusk was creeping up the valley. The latter fact brought Slocum a sense of satisfaction, and at the same time a growing uneasiness. He had, as it happened, signally failed to collect a certain sum from the store-keeper, who had expressed his opinion of him and his doings with vitriolic candor, and it was partly as the result of this that very little escaped his notice as he proceeded with an ostentatious leisureliness towards his dwelling.

A straggling row of stores and houses, log and frame and galvanized iron, jumbled all together in unsightly confusion, stretched away before him towards the gap in the forest where the railroad track came in, but it was the little groups of men who hung about them which occupied his quiet attention. He saluted them with somewhat forced good-humor as he went by, but there was no great cordiality in their responses, and some of them stared at him in uncompromising silence. There was, he felt, a certain tension in the atmosphere, and it was not without a purpose he stopped in front of the wooden hotel, where a little crowd had collected upon the verandah.