and women crowded about him to speak
to him, to grasp his hand. When they were hysterical in their laudations,
his grace and readiness controlled them; when they were direct and
earnest, he found words to say which they could draw aid from later.

"Am I developing--or degenerating--into a popular preacher?" he said
once, with a half restless laugh, to his shadow.

"You are not popular," was Latimer's answer. "Popular is not the word.
You are proclaiming too new and bold a creed."

"That is true," said Baird. "The pioneer is not popular. When he forces
his way into new countries he encounters the natives. Sometimes they eat
him--sometimes they drive him back with poisoned arrows. The country is
their own; they have their own gods, their own language. Why should a
stranger enter in?"

"But there is no record yet of a pioneer who lived--or died--in vain,"
said Latimer. "Some day--some day----"

He stopped and gazed at his friend, brooding. His love for him was a
strong and deep thing. It grew with each hour they spent together, with
each word he heard him speak. Baird was his mental nourishment and
solace. When they were apart he found his mind dwelling on him as a sort
of habit. But for this one man he would have lived a squalid life among
his people at Janney's Mills--squalid because he had not the elasticity
to rise above its narrow, uneducated dullness. The squalor so far as he
himself was concerned was not physical. His own small, plain home was as
neat as it was simple, but he had not the temperament which makes a man
friends. Baird possessed this temperament, and his home was a centre of
all that was most living. It was not the ordinary Willowfield household.
The larger outer world came and went. When Latimer went to it he was
swept on by new currents and felt himself warmed and fed.

There had been scarcely any day during years in which the two men had not
met. They had made journeys together; they had read the same books and
encountered the same minds. Each man clung to the intimacy.

"I want this thing," Baird had said more than once; "if you want it, I
want it more. Nothing must rob us of it."

"The time has come--it came long ago--" his Shadow said, "when I could
not live without it. My life has grown to yours."

It was Latimer's pleasure that he found he could be an aid to the man who
counted for so much to him. Affairs which pressed upon Baird he would
take in hand; he was able to transact business