“Once,” said Brian, “I saw you chop wood for thirteen hours.”

“You were there.”

“And down there in the quarry Grogan says you can load more stone to the hour than two wops.”

“You’re there feeding the crusher.  And you work as hard as I do.”

Brian rose.  His pipe was out.  He knew as he knocked the ashes into a saucer and filled again from a bowl of tobacco upon the mantel, that Donald’s eyes were upon him, abject with misery and remorse.  But neither spoke.

Irritable and upset, Brian went out upon the porch.

The straggling cluster of shacks around the rude store were dark.  Grogan’s weary men found bed early.  The moonlight was calm and cold and weirdly bright.  A wind mournful with the rustle of dead leaves came sharply from the trees behind the shack where by day the autumn sun touched russet into gold and scarlet.  A bleak spot up here!  The solitude of stone and struggle.  Could he expect Don to linger here and fight his battle?  Brian, with the weight of his years heavy on his shoulders, said honestly no.  And the problem still was with him.

He went down the steps and walked aimlessly along the ridge above the quarry.  The bright emptiness below was grotesque with shadow, shadows of ghost-like derricks, screens and drills.  On the spur track lay a car half full of stone.  Standing there with the trainload of Donald’s labor at his feet, it came sharply to Brian that the boy stood again at the parting of the ways.  And the year would tell.

To the right from the dank water of a quarry pool abandoned long since to catfish and willows, a milk-white mist was rising eerily into the moonlight.  Brian saw it but he saw it indistinctly.  He was thinking of the boy’s sister, her sweet face tragic with imploring.  It lay in the mist and yet not in the mist, and it was binding him to obligation.  He had written a promise.  That promise he must keep.  The face his memory etched upon the mist made its appeal to every finer instinct of his courage.

Brian did not face his problem with excitement.  He faced it with ruthless concentration.  All summer he had been groping through fog and disillusion to the meaning of service, service to his fellowmen, and he had groped through to something vague and lofty.  Service lay across the water where men raved in the red fever of destruction, service and inclination.  Could not one be mercifully the religion of the other?  Must service spring from the bitter dregs of self-denial?  Brian stared wretchedly into the dank white mist curling in the moonlight like a fallen cloud.  And again with his conscience up in arms he remembered the face of Donald’s sister.  In a sense he could thank the boy for the peace of his summer.  And he had written his promise.  He was like Kenny, that boy, inflammable of purpose, erratic in his vigor, and likable.  And he needed a friend, inflexible and kindly.