uld relish putting some questions to
him."

Then Jared Chick plunked an ash staff from a pile of hoop-poles left by
a chopper and went on his way along shaded woodland paths, avoiding
the main highroad. He decided that it would be better to go by the
roundabout way and show himself on the streets of town instead of on a
rural turnpike where countrified horses did not take kindly to a real
knight-errant.

"It was a good place back there for sleeping," reflected Walker Farr,
remembering the brook, singing over the stones, the whispering alders,
the old-fashioned house, and the somnolent landscape. "That man who has
been living there until the day of his emigration has certainly been
asleep for a long time and is sleeping soundly now; he is having a
wonderful dream. The nightmare will begin shortly and he will wake up."

After a time Farr came into a village, a hamlet of small houses which
toed the crack of a single street. It was near the hour of noon and from
the open windows of kitchens drifted scents of the dinners which the
women were preparing. All the men of the place seemed to be afield; only
women were in sight here and there at back doors, pinning freshly washed
garments on lines, beating dust from rugs, or, seen through the windows,
were bustling about the forenoon tasks set for patient household slaves
in gingham.

At one back door, his back comfortably set against a folded
clothes-reel, was a greasily fat tramp, gobbling a hand-out lunch which
a housewife had given to him.

Under a little hill where the road dipped at the edge of the hamlet here
sounded clink of steel on rock, suggesting that men labored there with
trowel and drill. There was complaining creaking of cordage--the arm of
a derrick sliced a slow arc across the blue sky of June.

The fat tramp held up his empty plate and whined a request and the hand
of a woman emerged from a close-by window and placed something in the
dish.

Farr slowed his steps and looked at the tramp, and a woman in a yard
near by stared over the top of a sheet which she was pinning on the line
and scowled at the new arrival.

"I wonder if I'm considered as the Damon of that Pythias?" Farr asked
himself, smiling into her frown. "But Damon is nomad spelled backward! I
wish I dared to ask her for a piece of that pie cooling on the sill."

Just then, over the clink of metal under the hill, above wail of
straining pulley, rose the screech of a man in agony, the raucous