“He looks like a Scotch army officer,” approved Sister. “He ought to be wearing kilts.”

“Sister! And he looks to me like a shoe-clerk,” sniffed Mrs. Blingham.

With that, they forgot the young man, who was neither a shoe-clerk nor more than a quarter Scotch. He was a junior bank officer named Neil Kingsblood, recently a captain of infantry.

On their way north, after lunch, the Blinghams got off their proper route. They were too proud to ask questions of the barbaric natives, and they circled through the expensive residence district of Ottawa Heights and a new, gray-shingle and stucco and asphalt-roof and picture-window real-estate development called Sylvan Park. As they turned from Linden Lane upon Balsam Trail, they did not note a “colonial cottage,” new and neat and painty, with broad white clapboards and blue shutters, on the northwest corner; nor did they look at the brisk and handsome young woman and the four-year-old girl, all pink and pale gold, who were coming out of the cottage. Yet this was the house of Captain Neil Kingsblood, and these were his wife, Vestal, and Biddy, his lively daughter.

“I guess we’ll have to ask the way. Do you s’pose the folks out here speak English?” said Mrs. Blingham irritably.

That evening, as they were approaching Crookston, where they were to spend the night, Mr. Blingham mused, “What was the name of that burg where we had lunch today—where we got lost, leaving town?”

“Funny, I can’t remember it,” said Mrs. Blingham. “Big River or something.”

“Where the good-looking young man was,” said Sister.

Chapter 2

Neil and Vestal Kingsblood were having an amount of servant trouble that seemed improbable with so tolerant a couple, and it was not entirely a comedy of domestic mishaps. Tragedy in wry forms may come even to the Colonial Residence of a Young Banker.

You would have said of Neil Kingsblood that he would not encounter either tragedy or remarkable success. Red-headed, curly-headed, blue-eyed, stalwart, cheerful, and as free of scholarship as he was of malice, Neil was, in November, 1944, an assistant cashier in the Second National Bank of Grand Republic, of which Mr. John William Prutt was president.

He was devoted to his family, his friends, his job, to shooting and fishing and golf, and to the guns, rods, canoes and other enchanting and childish objects associated with those sports. But he was now unfitted for excursions among the forests and lakes of Northern Minnesota. A year ago, when he was a captain of infantry, his right leg had been wrecked in the capture of an Italian village.

That leg would always be half an inch shorter than the other, but he could limp briskly now, and by spring of 1945, he was sure, he would be able to hitch about the court in a sort of tennis. The limp did not damage his position as one of the best-looking men in town; it gave an almost humorous lurch to his gait, and his chest and arms were as powerful as ever.