He felt aloof from the friendly turmoil, unable to believe that the place would be his own. The thing was too vast for his experience. It would surely be for another that Baldwin spread the Navajo blankets on the floor and couch; for some one else that Chalmers, of the beard--him they called the Brushwood Boy or eke "the human ambush"--removed piles of old magazines from the cot in the alcove; for some one else that Dallas tucked brushes into a ginger jar; and for some one else that Griggs tested water taps and the radiator. When they had cheerfully discovered that no one could think of anything further to do they trooped down Broadway to celebrate Ewing's advent in a dinner at the Monastery. When this was over and the crowd had thinned to a few late sitters they had him do a picture. The others watched him as he worked, standing on a bare table drawn to the wall. Brother Hilarius grew before their eyes, insecurely astride a bucking broncho, narrowly observed by two figures in the background--a dismayed brother of his order in gown of frieze and hempen girdle, and Red Phinney, contorting himself in ribald glee. The watchers applauded as the picture grew. They had not supposed that the quiet, almost timid, boy, who betrayed his unsophistication by countless little mannerisms, could have attained the sureness of line his strokes revealed. The heated air of the room rushed up to make a torrid zone of the region about the worker's head, and from time to time one of the watchers handed him a mug of creaming ale with which he washed the dust of the charcoal from his throat. He lost himself in the work at last. The voices, laughter, songs, strains of the piano, came but faintly to him, and were as the echoes of street life that sounded in his ears each night before he slept. It was after one o'clock when he stepped down from the table to survey the finished drawing. He knew he had done well, but he was glad to be told so by others. It was clearly their opinion that the club had in no way descended from its high standards of mural decoration. Baldwin brought a bottle of fixative and sprayed the drawing through a blowpipe. Then they drained a final bumper to the artist and the work and went out into the mild September night, making the empty street, sleeping in shadow, resound to their noisy talk. The light of a car crept ghostlike toward them and they stood to board it. As it moved on through Broadway Ewing thought of an empty creek bed at the bottom of some ravine at home. This was the dry time, but with earliest dawn would come the freshet, flooding the canyon, surging over its rocky bed to some outlet as mysterious as its source. The image brought him a sudden pang of homesickness. Despite the jovial friendliness of the crowd he was still a detached spectator. There was no intimacy for him, no real contact. He was glad to remember the bed that awaited him and confessed this to Chalmers.