He thought pretty well of himself all that day.  Howells treated him like the proprietor’s son; Pat Waugh, foreman of the cooperage, put “Mr. Arthur” or “Mr. Ranger” into every sentence; the workingmen addressed him as “sir,” and seemed to appreciate his talking as affably with them as if he were unaware of the precipice of caste which stretched from him down to them.  He was in a pleasant frame of mind as he went home and bathed and dressed for dinner.  And, while he knew he had really been in the way at the cooperage and had earned nothing, yet—­his ease about his social status permitting—­he felt a sense of self-respect which was of an entirely new kind, and had the taste of the fresh air of a keen, clear winter day.

This, however, could not last.  The estate was settled up; the fiction that he was of the proprietorship slowly yielded to the reality; the men, not only those over him but also those on whose level he was supposed to be, began to judge him as a man.  “The boys say,” growled Waugh to Howells, “that he acts like one of them damn spying dude sons proprietors sometimes puts in among the men to learn how to work ’em harder for less.  He don’t seem to catch on that he’s got to get his money out of his own hands.”

“Touch him up a bit,” said Howells, who had worshiped Hiram Ranger and in a measure understood what had been in his mind when he dedicated his son to a life of labor.  “If it becomes absolutely necessary I’ll talk to him.  But maybe you can do the trick.”

Waugh, who had the useful man’s disdain of deliberately useless men and the rough man’s way of feeling it and showing it, was not slow to act on Howells’s license.  That very day he found Arthur unconsciously and even patronizingly shirking the tending of a planer so that his teacher, Bud Rollins, had to do double work.  Waugh watched this until it had “riled” him sufficiently to loosen his temper and his language.  “Hi, there, Ranger!” he shouted.  “What the hell!  You’ve been here goin’ on six months now, and you’re more in the way than you was the first day.”

Arthur flushed, flashed, clenched his fists; but the planer was between him and Waugh, and that gave Waugh’s tremendous shoulders and fists a chance to produce a subduing visual impression.  A man, even a young man, who is nervous on the subject of his dignity, will, no matter how brave and physically competent, shrink from avoidable encounter that means doubtful battle.  And dignity was a grave matter with young Ranger in those days.

“Don’t hoist your dander up at me,” said Waugh.  “Get it up agin’ yourself.  Bud, next time he soldiers on you, send him to me.”

“All right, sir,” replied Bud, with a soothing grin.  And when Waugh was gone, he said to Arthur, “Don’t mind him.  Just keep pegging along, and you’ll learn all right.”

Bud’s was the tone a teacher uses to encourage a defective child.  It stung Arthur more fiercely than had Waugh’s.  It flashed on him that the men—­well, they certainly hadn’t been looking up to him as he had been fondly imagining.  He went at his work resolutely, but blunderingly; he spoiled a plank and all but clogged the machine.  His temper got clean away from him, and he shook with a rage hard to restrain from venting itself against the inanimate objects whose possessing devils he could hear jeering at him through the roar of the machinery.