Pritchard, trim and neat, a New Yorker from the careful arrangement of his tie to the tips of his patent boots, gazed with something like amazement at the man whom he had come to meet at the Grand Central Station.  Tavernake looked, indeed, like some splendid bushman whose life has been spent in the kingdom of the winds and the sun and the rain.  He was inches broader round the chest, and carried himself with a new freedom.  His face was bronzed right down to the neck.  His beard was fullgrown, his clothes travel-stained and worn.  He seemed like a breath of real life in the great New York depot, surrounded by streams of black-coated, pale-cheeked men.

Pritchard laughed softly as he passed his arm through his friend’s.

“Come, my Briton,” he said, “my primitive man, I have rooms for you in a hotel close here.  A bath and a mint julep, then I’ll take you to a tailor’s.  What about the big country?  It’s better than your salt marshes, eh?  Better than your little fishing village?  Better than building boats?”

“You know it,” Tavernake answered.  “I feel as though I’d been drawing in life for month after month.  Have I got to wear boots like yours—­patent?”

“Got to be done,” Pritchard declared.

“And the hat—­oh, my Heavens!” Tavernake groaned.  “I’ll never become civilized again.”

“We’ll see,” Pritchard laughed.  “Say, Tavernake, it was a great trip of ours.  Everything’s turning out marvelously.  The oil and the copper are big, man—­big, I tell you.  I reckon your five thousand dollars will be well on the way to half a million.  I’m pretty near there myself.”

It was not until later on, when he was alone, that Tavernake realized with how little interest he listened to his companion’s talk of their success.  It was so short a time ago since the building up of a fortune had been the one aim upon which every nerve of his body was centered.  Curiously enough, now he seemed to take it as a matter of course.

“On second thoughts, I’ll send a tailor round to the hotel,” Pritchard declared.  “I’ve rooms myself next yours.  We can go out and buy boots and the other things afterwards.”

By nightfall, Tavernake’s wardrobe was complete.  Even Pritchard regarded him with a certain surprise.  He seemed, somehow, to have gained a new dignity.

“Say, but you look great!” he exclaimed.  “They won’t believe it at the meeting to-morrow that you are the man who crossed the Yolite Mountains and swam the Peraneek River.  That’s a wonderful country you were in, Tavernake, after you left the tracks.”

They were in Broadway, with the roar of the city in their ears, and Tavernake, lifting his face starwards, suddenly seemed to feel the silence once more, the perfume of the pine woods, the scent of nature herself, freed through all these generations of any presence of man.

“I’ll never keep away from it,” he said, softly.  “I’ll have to go back.”