“It doesn’t look like war, does it?” said Rockwell, looking up the street and out towards the prairie where the day bloomed like a flower. Blue above—a deep, joyous blue, against which a white cloud rested or slowly travelled westward; a sky down whose vast cerulean bowl flocks of wild geese sailed, white and grey and black, while the woods across the Sagalac were glowing with a hundred colours, giving tender magnificence to the scene. The busy eagerness of a pioneer life was still a quiet, orderly thing, so immense was the theatre for effort and movement. In these wide streets, almost as wide as a London square, there was room to move; nothing seemed huddled, pushing, or inconvenient. Even the disorder of building lost its ugly crudity in the space and the sunlight.
“The only time I get frightened in life is when things look like that,” Ingolby answered. “I go round with a life-preserver on me when it seems as if ‘all’s right with the world.’”
The violin inside the barber-shop kept scraping out its cheap music—a coon-song of the day.
“Old Berry hasn’t much business this morning,” remarked Rockwell. “He’s in keeping with this surface peace.”
“Old Berry never misses anything. What we’re thinking, he’s thinking. I go fishing when I’m in trouble; Berry plays his fiddle. He’s a philosopher and a friend.”
“You don’t make friends as other people do.”
“I make friends of all kinds. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a kind of kinship with the roughs, the no-accounts, and the rogues.”
“As well as the others—I hope I don’t intrude!”
Ingolby laughed. “You? Oh, I wish all the others were like you. It’s the highly respectable members of the community I’ve always had to watch.”
The fiddle-song came squeaking out upon the sunny atmosphere. It arrested the attention of a man on the other side of the street—a stranger in strange Lebanon. He wore a suit of Western clothes as a military man wears mufti, if not awkwardly, yet with a manner not wholly natural—the coat too tight across the chest, too short in the body. However, the man was handsome and unusual in his leopard way, with his brown curling hair and well-cared-for moustache. It was Jethro Fawe.