this chance to the utmost with Morley's Raiders
when a slug ended his activities in the second year
of the war.

It was characteristic of the Makimmons that they
should each have left their family in precarious circumstances.
They were not, they would contemptuously
assert, farmers or merchants. When the timber
was cut from the valley, the underbrush burned,
and the superb cloth of grass started that had
formed the foundation of a number of comfortable
fortunes, the Makimmons, scornful of the effort, had
remained outside the profit.

Such income as they enjoyed had been obtained
from renting their acres to transient and indifferent
farmers. In the crises of life and death, or under
the desire for immediate and more liquor, they sold
necessary slices. This continued until nothing remained
for the present Gordon Makimmon but the
original dwelling -- now grotesquely misshapen from
the addition of casual sheds and extensions -- and a
small number of acres on the outskirts of town.

There he lived with Clare, his sister. Their
mother, the widow of that Makimmon whose disputatious
temper had been dignified by the epitaph
of "heroic sacrifice," had died of a complicity of
patent medicines the winter before. An older
brother had totally disappeared from the cognizance
of Greenstream during Gordon's boyhood; and a

[[21]]

p020 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p021w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p022

v?