“You are not popular,” was Latimer’s answer. “Popular is not the word. You are proclaiming too new and bold a creed.”
“That is true,” said Baird. “The pioneer is not popular. When he forces his way into new countries he encounters the natives. Sometimes they eat him—sometimes they drive him back with poisoned arrows. The country is their own; they have their own gods, their own language. Why should a stranger enter in?”
“But there is no record yet of a pioneer who lived—or died—in vain,” said Latimer. “Some day—some day——”
He stopped and gazed at his friend, brooding. His love for him was a strong and deep thing. It grew with each hour they spent together, with each word he heard him speak. Baird was his mental nourishment and solace. When they were apart he found his mind dwelling on him as a sort of habit. But for this one man he would have lived a squalid life among his people at Janney’s Mills—squalid because he had not the elasticity to rise above its narrow, uneducated dullness. The squalor so far as he himself was concerned was not physical. His own small, plain home was as neat as it was simple, but he had not the temperament which makes a man friends. Baird possessed this temperament, and his home was a centre of all that was most living. It was not the ordinary Willowfield household. The larger outer world came and went. When Latimer went to it he was swept on by new currents and felt himself warmed and fed.
There had been scarcely any day during years in which the two men had not met. They had made journeys together; they had read the same books and encountered the same minds. Each man clung to the intimacy.
“I want this thing,” Baird had said more than once; “if you want it, I want it more. Nothing must rob us of it.”
“The time has come—it came long ago—” his Shadow said, “when I could not live without it. My life has grown to yours.”
It was Latimer’s pleasure that he found he could be an aid to the man who counted for so much to him. Affairs which pressed upon Baird he would take in hand; he was able to transact business for him, to help him in the development of his plans, save him frequently both time and fatigue. It fell about that when the lectures were delivered at distant points the two men journeyed together.
Latimer entered Baird’s library on one occasion just as a sharp-faced, rather theatrical-looking man left it.
“You’ll let me know your decision, sir, as soon as possible,” the stranger departed, saying. “These things ought always to be developed just at the right moment. This is your right moment. Everybody is talking you over, one way or another.” When the stranger was gone, Baird explained his presence.