“Kin I do anything fer you in the provision line, Jim?” asked Carden, for the entertainment of his customers. “I’ve got some fresh bulk pork. Seems to me you hain’t had none lately.” Trundle refused to answer. He only stared out into the golden sunshine that lay on the road to his home. He saw through Carden’s remarks, and his heart felt heavier under the thought that before him were some of the faces which would be masked later on. He wondered if those men knew that a lazy, worthless vagabond could feel disgrace as keenly as they could. There was nothing left for him to do except to go home. He wanted to turn his mind-pictures of his wife and children into helpful realities. Somehow they had always comforted him in trouble. Oh, God! if only he could have foreseen the approach of this calamity! As he moved out of the store he felt vaguely as if his arms, legs, and body had nothing to do with his real, horrible self except to hinder it, to detain it near its spot of torture. Outside he drew a long, deep, trembling breath. His breast rose and expanded under his ragged shirt and then sank like a collapsed balloon, and lay still while he thought of himself. He was a dead man alive, a moving, breathing horror in the sight of mankind. He was sure that it was his strange nature that had brought him to it. Nature had, indeed, made him happy in rags, oblivious to material things. Had he been endowed with education he might have become a poet. He saw strange, transcendent possibilities in the blue skies; in the green growing things; in the dun heights of the mountains; in the depths of his children’s eyes; in the patient face of his wife. What an awakening! A shudder ran over him. He felt the lash; he heard Wade Sim’s voice of command; then his lower lip began to quiver, and something rising within him forced tears into his eyes. He had begun to pity himself. If only those men really understood him they would pardon his shortcomings. No human being could knowingly lash a man feeling as he felt. The road homeward led him into the depths of a wood where mighty trees arched overhead and obscured the sky. He envied a squirrel bounding unhindered to its sylvan home. Nature seemed to hold out her vast green arms to him; he wanted to sink into them and sob away the awful load that lay upon him. In the deepest part of the wood, where tall, rugged cliffs bordered the road, there was a spring. He paused, looked round him, and shuddered anew, for something told him it was at this secluded spot that he would receive his castigation.