ets them free to go again their roads of
doubled hatred. And when dusk came--dusk and a fatigue which made it
difficult to drag one foot after the other on the homeward
journey--Garry had reached the point where he had to speak his thoughts
aloud.

The woods were new to that paler, slighter man. He had to talk, but
his beginning was circuitous. He had been gazing down at his
rain-soaked length, grotesquely thin in the flapping garments borrowed
from Steve's wardrobe, to look up at last and smile, wryly.

"I was just thinking," he began. "I was just thinking if they could
only see me now--the crowd down at Morrison for instance. They used to
gibe me. They called me the immaculate Garry, once. Aren't you a lot
heavier than you look?"

Plodding along beside him Steve nodded as though the whole day had been
common with just such conversation.

"No. Those clothes were built with an eye to largeness of movement
which scarcely insured shape or draping, even upon me."

It was irrelevant, but it was a beginning. And the reference to the
crowd at Morrison made Garry's next remark clear.

"Wouldn't it jolt them, if they could see me? I thought of it this
morning when I was walking a log without so much as a waver. That
phrase relative to walking a chalk-line is weak and inadequate, after a
man has tried to work his way along a peeled hemlock. If anyone wants
to measure sobriety by word of mouth, there's his standard. It
involves the last degree in sure-footedness."

Again Steve bowed his head, but not so immediately this time. For
already he realized that this was not to be the opportunity for which
he was waiting. And the other man was quick to catch that uncertainty.

"The other evening----" he laughed unpleasantly--"that night when you
came back to camp in time to hear of Joe's proposed novelistic effort,
I think I mentioned it to you. I'm not sure. But whether I did or
not, it was, no doubt, scarcely introduced in the spirit in which I
should ask it now. . . . I suppose they have given you a fairly
thorough report of my--career, since we were knights bold and ladies
fair, haven't they?"

Without waiting for a reply he answered the question himself.

"Of course they have," he exclaimed, "because I recognized your fine
hand in Joe's attitude toward me, the very minute I waked up, back a
week or so ago, the morning after I'd done my Phil Sheridan stunt from
Allison's to your shack. But do you mind t