It's the only respectable-looking house in this township." They reached the turn of the road, and the judge touched up his colts to a sharper gait.

"No need of dallying," he observed quietly.

"It always makes me a little sick just to see the place.

I'd hate to have a break-down here." They came in sight of a squalid settlement, built raggedly about a blacksmith's shop and a saloon.

Half-a-dozen shanties clustered near the forge, a few roofs scattered through the shiftlessly cultivated fields, four or five barns propped by fence-rails, some sheds with gaping apertures through which the light glanced from side to side, a squad of thin, "razor-back" hogs--now and then worried by gaunt hounds--and some abused-looking hens, groping about disconsolately in the mire, a broken-topped buggy with a twisted wheel settling into the mud of the middle of the road (there was always abundant mud, here, in the dryest summer), a lowering face sneering from a broken window--Six-Cross-Roads was forbidding and forlorn enough by day.