her the
other day, sitting right in the house there, 'Pompey Hollidew,' he says,
'won't even talk will....' He'd like to take it all with him to the devil,
Pompey would." He turned with a sigh to the log. A cross-cut saw, with a
handle at either end, lay upon the ground; and Gordon, grasping the far
handle, helped him to drag the slim, glittering steel through the
powdering fiber of the wood.

As he worked mechanically Gordon's thoughts returned to the past, the past
which had collapsed so utterly, so disastrously, so swiftly upon his
complacency, robbing him of his sustenance, of Clare, of his home. The
complaining voice of the old man finally pierced his abstraction. "If you
are going to ride," Bartamon complained, "don't drag your feet."

The two men consumed a formless, ample meal, after which Gordon still
waited negligently for the priest. The sun sank toward the western range;
the late afternoon grew as hushed, as rich in color, in vert shadows,
ultramarine, and amber, as heavy in foliage bathed in aureate light, as
the nave of a cathedral under stained glass.

In a corner of the shed Gordon found a fishing rod of split bamboo, sprung
with time and neglect, the wrappings hanging and effectually loose. A
small brass reel was fastened to the butt, holding an amount of line. He
balanced the rod in his grasp, discovering it to be the property of the
old man.

"What'll you take for it?" he demanded. His store of money had been
reduced to a precarious sum of silver; but the longing had seized him to
fish in the open, to follow a stream into the tranquil dusk.

"I got some flies too." The other resurrected a cigar box, which held some
feathered hooks attached to doubtful guts. "They are dried out," Gordon
pronounced, testing them; "what will you take for the whole worthless
lot?" Bartamon demurred: the rod had been a good rod, it had been given to
him in the past by a mayor, or had it been a senator? It was not like
common rods, made of six strips of bamboo, but of eight, the line was
silk.... He would take sixty cents.

Delaying his expression of gratitude to the priest--he could stop on his
return with trout--Gordon was soon tramping over the soft, dusty road to
where he bordered a stream skirting the eastern range. A shelf of
pasturage ran, deep blue-green sod, against the rocky wall; to the left,
through scattered trees, the valley was visible; on the right the range
mounted precipitant, verdant, to its far cro