“How could you hear what Tim was saying?” Mary asked.

It was almost the first word she had spoken to me, and I was in my chair again, and she was where I had planned so cunningly to have her.

“I know my brother’s voice,” I answered gravely.

“I couldn’t make out a word,” said she, “but it isn’t like him to let an old man go tottering over fields to see him.  He would have come up here.”

“I guess he would.”  There was a twinkle in her eyes and I knew it was useless to dissemble.  “Tim and I are different.  I never hesitate to use strategy to get my chair, even at the expense of a feeble old man.”

“How gallant you are,” she said with a touch of scorn.

“You must not scold,” I cried.  “Remember I had reason, after all.  You did not come to see Josiah Nummler.”

She was taken by surprise.  It was brutal of me.  But somehow the old reckless spirit had come back.  I was speaking as a soldier should to a fair woman, bold and free.  That’s what a woman likes.  She hates a man who stutters love.  And while I did not own to myself the least passion for the girl, I had seen just enough of her on the evening before and I had smoked just enough over her that morning to be in a sentimental turn of mind that was amusing.  And I gained my point.  She turned her head so as almost to hide her face from me, and I heard a gentle laugh.

“All’s fair in love and war,” I said, “and were Josiah twice as old, I should be justified in using those means to this end.”

Then I rocked.  There is something so sociable about rocking.  And I smoked.  There is something so sociable about smoking.  For a moment the girl sat quietly, screening her face from me.  Then she began rocking too, and I caught a sidelong glance of her eye, and the color mounted to her cheeks, and we laughed together.

So it came that she suddenly stopped her rocking, and dropping the little basket at my feet, exclaimed:  “I love soldiers—­just love them!”

Then I told her that I must keep Perry Thomas’s oration going to the end, and she leaned toward me, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on mine and asked:  “But will you?”

“I can make no promises,” I answered.  “They say our bodies change entirely every seven years.  Mark Hope, age fifty, will be a different man from Mark Hope, age twenty-three.  He may have nothing to boast about himself, and his distorted mind may magnify the deeds of the younger man.  Now the younger man refuses to commit himself.  He will not be in any way responsible for his successors.”

“How wise you are!” she cried.

“Wise?” I exclaimed, searching her face for a sign of mockery.  But there was none.

“I mean you talk so differently from the others in the valley.  Either they talk of crops or weather, or they sit in silence and just look wise.  I suppose you have travelled?”

“As compared to most folks in Black Log I am a regular Gulliver,” I answered.  “My father was a much-travelled man.  He was an Englishman and came to the valley by chance and settled here, and to his dying day he was a puzzle to the people.  That an Englishman should come to Six Stars was a phenomenon.  That Isaac Bolum and Henry Holmes should be born here was no mere chance—­it was a law of nature.”