phic flashes of the stream. Under these the doctor pitched his
tents, the hammering of the pegs driving through the sounds of man's
occupation into the quietude that lapped them like sleeping tides. The
others hung about the center of things where wagons and mess chests, pans
and fires, made the nucleus of the human habitation.

Susan, sitting on a box, with a treasure of dead branches at her feet,
waited yet a space before setting them in the fire form. She was sunk in
the apathy of the body surrendered to restoring processes. The men's
voices entered the channels of her ears and got no farther. Her vision
acknowledged the figure of Leff nearby sewing up a rent in his coat, but
her brain refused to accept the impression. Her eye held him in a heavy
vacuity, watched with a trancelike fixity his careful stitches and the
armlong stretch of the drawn thread.

Had she shifted it a fraction, it would have encountered David squatting
on the bank washing himself. His long back, the red shirt drawn taut
across its bowed outline, showed the course of his spine in small regular
excrescences. The water that he raised in his hands and rinsed over his
face and neck made a pleasant, clean sound, that her ear noted with the
other sounds. Somewhere behind her Daddy John and Courant made a noise
with skillets and picket pins and spoke a little, a sentence mutteringly
dropped and monosyllabically answered.

David turned a streaming face over his shoulder, blinking through the
water. The group he looked at was as idyllically peaceful as wayfarers
might be after the heat and burden of the day. Rest, fellowship, a
healthy simplicity of food and housing were all in the picture either
visibly or by implication.

"Throw me the soap, Leff," he called, "I forgot it."

The soap lay on the top of a meal sack, a yellow square, placed there by
David on his way to the water. It shone between Susan and Leff, standing
forth as a survival of a pampered past. Susan's eye shifted toward it,
fastened on it, waiting for Leff's hand to come and bear it away. But
the hand executed no such expected maneuver. It planted the needle
deliberately, pushed it through, drew it out with its long tail of
thread. Surprise began to dispel her lethargy. Her eye left the soap,
traveled at a more sprightly speed back to Leff, lit on his face with a
questioning intelligence.

David called again.

"Hurry up. I want to light the fire."

Leff took ano