The two men stood still in the cold wind that came up the sands to the south-west. To the left, as they faced the wind, went the black railway track on the pier, and the small engine stood dribbling. On the right the track ran curiously black past a little farm-place with a corrugated iron roof, and past a big field where the stubble of maize or beans stood ragged and sere, on into the little hollow of bush, where the mine was, beyond the stagnant creek. It was curious how intensely black, velvety and unnatural, the railway-track looked on this numb coast-front. The steamer hooted again. “Cold it is up here,” said Somers. “It is cold. He’s coming now, though,” replied William James. They stood together still another minute, looking down the pale sands at the foam and the dark-blue sea, the sere grass scattered with bungalows. It was a strange, different bond of sympathy united them, from that that subsisted between Somers and Jack, or Somers and Kangaroo. Hardly sympathy at all, but an ancient sort of root-knowledge. “Well, good-bye,” said Somers, wanting to be gone before the manager came up with the papers. He shook hands with William James--but as usual, Jaz gave him a slack hand. Their eyes met--and the look, something like a taunt, in Trewhella’s secretive grey eye, made Somers stiffen his back, and a kind of haughtiness flew into his soul. “Different men, different ways, Mr Trewhella,” he said. William James did not answer, but smiled rather stubbornly. It seemed to Somers the man would be smiling that stubborn, taunting smile till the crack of doom. “I told Mrs Somers what I think about it,” said Jaz, with a very Cornish accent. “I doubt if she’ll ever do much more believin’ than I shall.” And the taunt was forked this time. “She says she believes entirely in Kangaroo.” “Does she now? Who did she tell it to?” “Me.” Trewhella still stood with that faint grin on his face, short and stocky and erect like a little post left standing. Somers looked at him again, frowning, and turned abruptly down the bank. The smile left the face of the Cornishman, and he just looked obstinate, indifferent, and curiously alone, as if he stood there all alone in the world. He watched Somers emerge on the sands below, and go walking slowly among the sea-ragged flat shelves of the coast-bed rocks, his head dropping, looking in the pools, his hands in his pockets. And the obstinate light never changed in the eyes of the watcher, not even when he turned to the approaching manager.