There was one, a big, grizzled Irishman, whom Ted had seen only a few times. Nevertheless, he was one of his closest friends. They had met on a night when the boy was hunting, and he could remember still how they had lain together by the tiny camp fire, with the coyotes yelping in the distance, with the great plain stretching out into the dark, with the slender curl of smoke rising straight upward and the big stars seeming almost within reach of his hand in the thin air. The lonely Irishman had opened his heart to his new friend and had told him much of his own country, so unlike this big bare one, a dear green land where the tumbledown cottages and little fields were crowded together in such comforting comradeship. “You could open your window of a summer night and give a call to the neighbors,” he sighed, “and you needn’t to have the voice of the giant Finn McCoul to make them hear. In this place a man could fall sick and die alone and no one be the wiser.” His reminiscences had wandered farther and farther until he began to tell the tales and legends familiar in his own countryside, stories of the “Little People” and of Ireland in ancient times. Of them all Ted remembered most clearly the story of the white greyhounds of the King of Connemara, upon which his friend had dwelt long, showing that in spite of its being a thousand years old, it was his favorite tale. “Like those dogs on Arran Creek, they were perhaps,” the Irishman said, “only sleeker of coat and swifter of foot, I’m thinking.” “But they couldn’t be faster,” Ted had objected. “The Arran dogs can catch coyotes and jack-rabbits and people have called those the quickest animals that run.” “Ah,” returned the other with true Irish logic, “those Arran dogs are Russian, they tell me, and these I speak of were of Connemara, and what comes out of Ireland you may be sure, is faster and fairer than anything else on earth.” Against such reasoning Ted had judged it impossible to argue and had dropped into silence and finally into sleep with the voices of the coyotes and the legend of the lean, white Irish greyhounds still running like swift water through his dreams. After that he had visited the lonely shepherd whenever he could find time to travel so far. Together they had hunted deer and trapped beaver in the foothills above the Big Basin or, when the sheep had to be moved to new pasture, had spent hours in earnest talk, plodding patiently in the dust after the slow-moving flock. The long habit of silence had taken deep hold upon the Irishman, but with Ted alone he seemed willing to speak freely. It was on one of these occasions that he had given the boy the image of Saint Christopher, “For,” he said, “you are like to be a great roamer and a great traveler from the way you talk, and those who carry the good Saint Christopher with them, always travel safely.”