e
touch of elbows, the sensation of fellowship. The primal instinct of the
herd asserted itself, the need of human companionship of any sort.

But he failed miserably, as Jud Clark could never have failed. He could
not drink with them. He could not sink to their level of degradation.
Their oaths and obscenity sickened and disgusted him, and their talk of
women drove him into the fresh air.

The fact that he could no longer drink himself into a stupor puzzled
him. Bad whiskey circulated freely among the hay stacks and bunk houses
where the harvest hands were quartered, and at ruinous prices. The men
clubbed together to buy it, and he put in his share, only to find that
it not only sickened him, but that he had a mental inhibition against
it.

They called him the "Dude," and put into it gradually all the class
hatred of their wretched sullen lives. He had to fight them, more than
once, and had they united against him he might have been killed. But
they never united. Their own personal animosities and angers kept them
apart, as their misery held them together. And as time went on and his
muscles hardened he was able to give a better account of himself. The
time came when they let him alone, and when one day a big shocker fell
off a stack and broke his leg and Dick set it, he gained their respect.
They asked no questions, for their law was that the past was the past.
They did not like him, but in the queer twisted ethics of the camp they
judged the secret behind him by the height from which he had fallen, and
began slowly to accept him as of the brotherhood of derelicts.

With his improvement in his physical condition there came, toward the
end of the summer, a more rapid subsidence of the flood of the long
past. He had slept out one night in the fields, where the uncut alfalfa
was belled with purple flowers and yellow buttercups rose and nodded
above him. With the first touch of dawn on the mountains he wakened to a
clarity of mind like that of the morning. He felt almost an exaltation.
He stood up and threw out his arms.

It was all his again, never to lose, the old house, and David and Lucy;
the little laboratory; the church on Sunday mornings. Mike, whistling
in the stable. A wave of love warmed him, a great surging tenderness. He
would go back to them. They were his and he was theirs. It was at first
only a great emotion; a tingling joyousness, a vast relief, as of one
who sees, from a far distance, the lights in