Ottumwa tri-weekly courier. [volume] (Ottumwa, Iowa) 1903-1916, 1908-01-21
CHAPTER xLvI.
The Wisdom Of the Wise.

| uS WiSuOTT OF tHe WISE.
| Vic Morris rode away from Porto
garten, rapidly at first, but though he
was in the finest training and the
loaned machine suited him to mar
vel, he gradually went slower and
slower till he could almost have
walked as fast Vida's easy dismissal
of his offer the completeness of
Phil Calmont's victory had robbed
himself of his self-confdence.
That had always been his strong
hold his sequence, his four aces, his
Austrian Army Awfully Arrayed,"
as Janet had explained to him more
than once. He remembered the last
expression. He thought it sounded
like Shakespeare. Vic Morris had
never failed In anything before OF
course they had fired" him from the
Incubus pits but then anybody who
does his work too well to please 9th
er people, must expect that His
pride was not hurt by what man
could do to him. But woman girls
they were another matter. He had,
as he said Slipped up with Vida.
She had been laughing in her sleeve
at him him-Vic Morris, Who up
till now had always had his own way
-or taken it. How had he? Why, by
crashing through all peevish oppo-
sitions, with his head down, like a bull
charging hazel-coppice whose part
ed shoots smart his tanks.
But suddenly, from Vida's attitude,
he conceived dread of what was be-
fore him. The nearer to Kirktown he
got. the less did he desire to enter
without preparation into the presence
of Janet of the Eyes of Live Sapphire.
He called to mind her letters. One by
one he conned them. He remembered
whole passages. Yes sitting in the
Hotel Colon, or up on the brown
sides Of the Sierra, they had seemed
pretty conclusive. But now there
was the shock of Vida of Phil ~
once his assistant, the lad to whom
he had taught the very A, B, G or his
work, whom even yet he could hardly
trust $50 in his bitterness he told him
self ito chop kindling without cut
ting himself" Yet Phil Calmont had
been preferred before him! 1t was I'M
believable. Phil had held Vida in his
arms. He. the rejected Ludoyic
Morris, G. e. had heard her laugh
even as she pushed Phil away the
laugh that only one man hears from
woman the laugh that Vic Morris
had never yet heard in his life. And
he hummed ''The Voice That Breath
ed Ger Eden" which did not make
things easier at all.
Then something that his friend Mr..
Irongray had said to him after he had
been fired" by those Incubus people
swan up from the under-deeps of his
consciousness. 1.-The last shall be
first!''
Vic had dwelt long enough in Scot
ed to receive it as philosophy and
had even called it "preachiness' to
his startled friend the Cameronian
minister. Well, he had been wrong
and Mr.. Irongray right.
. His thoughts turned toward the
Kirk on the Hill. He would go up
there, get some lunch at the manse,
and then in the afternoon, when all
would be quiet at the Fowlers, he
would yes, he would go and have it
cut with Janet. But OH in what a
different spirit in what a chastened
mood not Vic Morris, but another.
Of course, he would tell her all.'
He climbed up the little incline, the
wagon ruts that led from the Incubus
mines dying away as the road forked
and reforked. till only the wheelbar-