The professor, buoyed up, perhaps, by the conceit which comes to a man through the possession of a real sheepskin diploma, granted by a university of good standing, did not think it necessary to defend his literary taste. He busied himself in pruning a stick he had cut in the forest, and finally he got it into the semblance of a walking cane. He was an athletic man, and the indolence of camp life did not suit him as it did Yates. He tested the stick in various ways when he had trimmed it to his satisfaction.
“Are you ready for a ten-mile walk?” he asked of the man in the hammock.
“Good gracious, no. Man wants but little walking here below, and he doesn’t want it ten miles in length either. I’m easily satisfied. You’re off, are you? Well, so long. And I say, Renny, bring back some bread when you return to camp. It’s the one safe thing to do.”
CHAPTER IX.
Renmark walked through the woods and then across the fields, until he came to the road. He avoided the habitations of man as much as he could, for he was neither so sociably inclined nor so frequently hungry as was his companion. He strode along the road, not caring much where it led him. Everyone he met gave him “Good-day,” after the friendly custom of the country. Those with wagons or lighter vehicles going in his direction usually offered him a ride, and went on, wondering that a man should choose to walk when it was not compulsory. The professor, like most silent men, found himself good company, and did not feel the need of companionship in his walks. He had felt relieved rather than disappointed when Yates refused to accompany him. And Yates, swinging drowsily in his hammock, was no less gratified. Even where men are firm and intimate friends, the first few days of camping out together is a severe strain on their regard for each other. If Damon and Pythias had occupied a tent together for a week, the worst enemy of either, or both, might at the end of that time have ventured into the camp in safety, and would have been welcome.
Renmark thought of these things as he walked along. His few days’ intimacy with Yates had shown him how far apart they had managed to get by following paths that diverged more and more widely the farther they were trodden. The friendship of their youth had turned out to be merely ephemeral. Neither would now choose the other as an intimate associate. Another illusion had gone.
“I have surely enough self-control,” said Renmark to himself, as he walked on, “to stand his shallow flippancy for another week, and not let him see what I think of him.”
Yates at the same time was thoroughly enjoying the peaceful silence of the camp. “That man is an exaggerated schoolmaster, with all the faults of the species abnormally developed. If I once open out on him, he will learn more truth about himself in ten minutes than he ever heard in his life before. What an unbearable prig he has grown to be.” Thus ran Yates’ thoughts as he swung in his hammock, looking up at the ceiling of green leaves.