Phil, with the call of the open born in him, preferred the out-of-doors and nature’s silences to all else that the world contained.
They would stand there together, looking over the dark rows of young trees, erect and soldier-like in the orchard, against the background of white,––away down to the Kalamalka Lake, smooth and frozen over, then beyond to the low hills that undulated interminably. Quietly, they would admire the sky above them as it seemed fairly strung over with myriads of fairy lamps, twinkling and changing colour in real fairy delight. They would watch those fairy globes here and there shatter into fragments––as if with the cold––and trail earthward in a shimmering streak of silver-dust. They 272 would wait till the moon sailed up over the hills in all her enchantment, then slowly on the heels of their boots, they would beat out the dying embers from the bowls of their pipes, take a glance down the end of the orchard to Ah Sing’s shack––where a dim light, suggestive of nothing else but Orientalism, seemed ever to be burning––nod to each other and smile, then turn in without a word and go to bed.
It was in these silences that Phil got to know Jim for the true gentleman he was. It was away out there in that evening stillness that Jim, lonely and misunderstood for the most part, grasped for the first time in his life the true meaning of comradeship, and it aroused in him a fierce love for Phil that could be likened only to the mother-love of a cougar for her young.
That there was some shadow in Phil’s life which Phil had never spoken of to him, Jim knew only too well, but he cared little for his friend’s past. Only the present counted with men like Jim Langford. Besides, it was little after all that Phil knew of Jim. But what he did know was all to the good.
And, were they not in the West where heredity and social caste is scoffed at, where what a man has sprung from, what he has been or done amiss, matters not at all; where only whether or not he now stands four-square with his fellows counts in the reckoning?
Yet, many times, Phil had made up his mind to confide in Jim and tell him of all his past dealings with Brenchfield; what he had suffered in his youthful folly for that creature who had only sought to do him irreparable injury in return. But, somehow, he had kept thrusting it into the background till a more favourable opportunity should present itself.
The inevitable did come, however, swift and sudden, and all unexpectedly for both of them.