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 the windows of home.  Save for the gap between the drunken revel at the ranch and his awakening to David’s face bending over him in the cabin, everything was clear.  Still by an effort, but successfully, he could unite now the two portions of his life with only a scar between them.

Not that he formulated it.  It was rather a mood, an impulse of unreasoning happiness.  The last cloud had gone, the last bit of mist from the valley.  He saw Haverly, and the children who played in its shaded streets; Mike washing the old car, and the ice cream freezer on Sundays, wrapped in sacking on the kitchen porch.  Jim Wheeler came back to him, the weight of his coffin dragging at his right hand as he helped to carry it; he was kneeling beside Elizabeth’s bed, and putting his hand over her staring eyes so she would go to sleep.

The glow died away, and he began to suffer intensely.  They were all lost to him, along with the life they represented.  And already he began to look back on his period of forgetfulness with regret.  At least then he had not known what he had lost.

He wondered again what they knew.  What did they think?  If they believed him dead, was that not kinder than the truth?  Outside of David and Lucy, and of course Bassett, the sole foundation on which any search for him had rested had been the semi-hysterical recognition of Hattie Thorwald.  But he wondered how far that search had gone.