The blacksmith and the postmaster passed here and there, setting alight their lamps. No man spoke on either side. Both factions sat looking across the little white-floored lane of No Man’s Land which lay between them. A quick motion, a shout, the sound of a shot, would have been fatal to half the men present here; but if any one of them felt agitation, it was not manifest by any word or sign, by any paling of the face or trembling of the hand. Unagitated, calm, they sat, each with his eye on his own selected man, ready for what might happen. What did happen was this: The door darkened against the pale starlight. There stepped slowly into the interior, where the shadows lay heavy upon the floor, the figure of a tall man. It was a man whom they all knew. As he came into the circle lighted by the lamps, a sort of sigh went up, audible in its united volume. It was David Joslin! Now they knew why they were to come here. The leader of the Joslins had come back! That meant trouble. He had not died—everybody knew that—everybody had heard from down the river that he had run out and left the country. But now he had got courage to come back! Yes, it meant trouble. The men on both sides eased off their pistol belts, loosened their holsters, under pretense of settling their coat tails or fumbling for tobacco. But David Joslin raised his hand at once. “Wait!” said he. So, still silent, still motionless, they sat and looked at him, many in contempt, as many in judgment suspended. He seemed thinner even than when he had left. His face bore a certain scholarly whiteness visible even under the burning of the sun—Joslin did not tell them so, but the truth was he had walked more than half the way from Brandon College—where for two years he had slaved at learning as no man in all the history of that school had been thought able to slave. Penniless at his hopeless start, he still was penniless after his overleaping of all rules and schedules and curricula. He had walked to this, his great trial. In some way he had been fed. In his own conviction that had been by direct act of God. Better clad than when he had left, in a dark suit of clothing which did not fit him ill, with shoes at least not badly broken, and with certain touches of refinements of the civilization outside, none the less he remained the mountain man they had known so well. But something in his voice seemed different His diction had altered perceptibly, if not consistently. He stood before them now at ease, a leader, a speaker, even an orator of some sort, at least in the possession of that gift of oratory which in simple terms commands the attention of an audience.