He wrote a few words on a scrap of paper and handed it to Gard.
"May I keep this tract in exchange?"
"It is not exchanged. It is given."
Gard turned his horse. The general looked up.
"You are a young man"—silence—"But your sect takes no part in wars." Gard waited. "Do you know the subject of this tract?"
"It is on the text, 'I must be about my Father's business.'"
The general seemed to have in mind to say more. He looked at Gard peculiarly—not quite as the others had seemed to do, half suspecting, half recognizing an alien being, a moral and mental unknown at some withdrawn height, but as if recognizing one like himself in isolation and pilgrimage, and so understanding his bearing and capacity for silence.
The horsemen behind whispered and smiled.
"Very well." The general turned again to the working squads, and Gard rode away in the smoke that drifted from the fires across the track. He had a sense, too, of some flash of recognition that had gone below the part he was playing, and seemed to involve a salutation and question of other import and circumstance, a recognition of kinship in the knowledge of other realities than the feet walk upon or the eyes see; knowledge of the silence out of which one is born, of the flux of his present, of destiny in ambush, of the "stream of the flying constellations," and the steady pour of time, "inhaled as a vapor;" knowledge of the individual's own lonely issue in the midst of these. But the turning again to his working squads seemed to have been the general's solution—or, at least, conclusion. "Very well;" one must be about the business set him to do. "He must work in his garden," had been more than one sage's conclusion.