The green, mid May Virginian afternoon was arched with a sky as blue as the tiles of the Temple of Heaven and steeped in a wash of sunlight as yellow as gold: smoke-hazy peaks piling up in the distance, billowy verdure like clumps of trembling jade between, shaded with masses of blue-black shadow, and lazying up and down, by gashed ravine and rounded knoll a road like red lacquer, fringed with stone wall and sturdy shrub and splashed here and there with the purple stain of the Judas-tree and the snow of dogwood blooms. Nothing in all the springy landscape but looked warm and opalescent and inviting—except a tawny bull that from across a barred fence-corner switched a truculent tail in silence and glowered sullenly at the big motor halted motionless at the side of the twisting road. Curled worm-like in the driver’s seat, with his chin on his knees, John Valiant sat with his eyes upon the distance. For an hour he had whirred through that wondrous shimmer of color with a flippant loitering breeze in his face, sweet from the crimson clover that poured and rioted over the [Pg 50]roadside: past nests of meditative farm-buildings, fields of baby-green corn, occasional ramshackle dirt-daubed cabins with doorways hung with yellow honeysuckle and flagrant trumpet-vines, and here and there a quiet old church, Gothic and ivied and gray whose leaded windows watched benignantly over myrtled graveyards. A great soothing suspiration of peace seemed to swell from it all to lap the traveler like the moist balminess of a semi-tropical sea. “Chum old man,” said Valiant, with his arm about the bulldog’s neck, “if those color-photograph chaps had shown us this, we simply wouldn’t have believed it, would we? Such scenery beats the roads we’re used to, what? If it were all like this—but of course it isn’t. We’ll get to our own bailiwick presently, and wake up. Never mind; we’re country gentlemen, Chummy, en route to our estate! No silly snuffle, now! Out with it! That’s right,”—as a sharp bark rewarded him—“that’s the proper enthusiasm.” He wound his strong fingers in a choking grip in the scruff of the white neck, as a chipmunk chattered by on the low stone wall. “No, you don’t, you cannibal! He’s a jolly little beggar, and he doesn’t deserve being eaten!” He filled his brier-wood pipe and drew in great breaths of the fragrant incense. “What a pity you don’t smoke, Chum; you miss such a lot! I [Pg 51]saw a poodle once in a circus that did. But he’d been to college. Think how you could think if you only smoked! We may have to do a lot of thinking, where we’re bound to. Wonder what we’ll find? Oh, that’s right, leave it all to me, of course, and wash your paws of the whole blooming business!”