ed like a flower.
Blue above--a deep, joyous blue, against which a white cloud rested or
slowly travelled westward; a sky down whose vast cerulean bowl flocks of
wild geese sailed, white and grey and black, while the woods across the
Sagalac were glowing with a hundred colours, giving tender magnificence
to the scene. The busy eagerness of a pioneer life was still a quiet,
orderly thing, so immense was the theatre for effort and movement. In
these wide streets, almost as wide as a London square, there was room
to move; nothing seemed huddled, pushing, or inconvenient. Even
the disorder of building lost its ugly crudity in the space and the
sunlight.

"The only time I get frightened in life is when things look like that,"
Ingolby answered. "I go round with a life-preserver on me when it seems
as if 'all's right with the world.'"

The violin inside the barber-shop kept scraping out its cheap music--a
coon-song of the day.

"Old Berry hasn't much business this morning," remarked Rockwell. "He's
in keeping with this surface peace."

"Old Berry never misses anything. What we're thinking, he's thinking.
I go fishing when I'm in trouble; Berry plays his fiddle. He's a
philosopher and a friend."

"You don't make friends as other people do."

"I make friends of all kinds. I don't know why, but I've always had a
kind of kinship with the roughs, the no-accounts, and the rogues."

"As well as the others--I hope I don't intrude!"

Ingolby laughed. "You? Oh, I wish all the others were like you. It's the
highly respectable members of the community I've always had to watch."

The fiddle-song came squeaking out upon the sunny atmosphere. It
arrested the attention of a man on the other side of the street--a
stranger in strange Lebanon. He wore a suit of Western clothes as a
military man wears mufti, if not awkwardly, yet with a manner not wholly
natural--the coat too tight across the chest, too short in the body.
However, the man was handsome and unusual in his leopard way, with his
brown curling hair and well-cared-for moustache. It was Jethro Fawe.

Attracted by the sound of the violin, he stayed his steps and smiled
scornfully. Then his look fell on the two figures at the door of the
barber-shop, and his eyes flashed.

Here was the man he wished to see--Max Ingolby, the man who stood
between him and his Romany lass. Here was a chance of speaking face to
face with the man who was robbing him. What he should do when they me