Lobelia is the new residential suburb on the outskirts of a new town, which is itself on the outskirts of most things. The Big Woods come right down to the streets of Lobelia; bears have been seen on Frontenac Boulevard. Yes, Lobelia is pretty new. But not so new that you’d expect to smell kinnikinnick there.
Yet, one June evening, a savour of that tobacco plant passed along Frontenac Boulevard and down Centre Street and up Magnetwan Avenue. Here and there, an old-timer, relegated to carpet slippers and a back bedroom, sniffed it, and dreamed of prairie and poplar-bluff and the Blackfoot brave outside the H.B.C. Store. Leigh Harvey, busy lifting dandelions from his beautiful lawn, with a dental-looking instrument, dropped it and knelt motionless in the growing dew. He set his big hands on his hip, because they trembled suddenly. To himself, he whispered, “It couldn’t be him—come at last—after all these years.”
He drew a deep breath. The smell was yet in the air. He raised his keen eyes slowly from the dandelions and looked across the hedge that screened his new iron fence.
At the base of the gaudy fence a man was sitting, smoking a little, blackened corncob pipe. He was a mere kernel of a little brown, old man, within the husks of many formless garments. On the grass edge beside him was a pedlar’s basket.
Leigh Harvey, leading citizen of Lobelia, rose silently to his feet. He was shaking. His strong mouth twitched. His eyes were guarded, watchful, but triumphant.
He leaned across his new iron gate with the gold knobs on it, and said, “Hallo, there!”
His voice was rough with emotion held in check—for four years. The old pedlar looked up sideways, cautiously. He twitched the shiny cloth cover off the big basket.
“Boot-laces,” he began, mechanically, “pipes, ver’ cheap pipes, plugs, machine-oil, stickin’-plaster, spools, ver’ nice handkerchiefs.”
He shook a faded rag out of the basket. Harvey leaned over the gate, his new gold watch-chain tinkling against the iron—a stalwart figure in shirt-sleeves. “You come far?” he said, as carelessly as he could.
“Ver’ long way, boss.”