"I was just thinking," he began. "I was just thinking if they could only see me now--the crowd down at Morrison for instance. They used to gibe me. They called me the immaculate Garry, once. Aren't you a lot heavier than you look?" Plodding along beside him Steve nodded as though the whole day had been common with just such conversation. "No. Those clothes were built with an eye to largeness of movement which scarcely insured shape or draping, even upon me." It was irrelevant, but it was a beginning. And the reference to the crowd at Morrison made Garry's next remark clear. "Wouldn't it jolt them, if they could see me? I thought of it this morning when I was walking a log without so much as a waver. That phrase relative to walking a chalk-line is weak and inadequate, after a man has tried to work his way along a peeled hemlock. If anyone wants to measure sobriety by word of mouth, there's his standard. It involves the last degree in sure-footedness." Again Steve bowed his head, but not so immediately this time. For already he realized that this was not to be the opportunity for which he was waiting. And the other man was quick to catch that uncertainty. "The other evening----" he laughed unpleasantly--"that night when you came back to camp in time to hear of Joe's proposed novelistic effort, I think I mentioned it to you. I'm not sure. But whether I did or not, it was, no doubt, scarcely introduced in the spirit in which I should ask it now. . . . I suppose they have given you a fairly thorough report of my--career, since we were knights bold and ladies fair, haven't they?" Without waiting for a reply he answered the question himself. "Of course they have," he exclaimed, "because I recognized your fine hand in Joe's attitude toward me, the very minute I waked up, back a week or so ago, the morning after I'd done my Phil Sheridan stunt from Allison's to your shack. But do you mind telling me what your own opinion is?" Stephen O'Mara knew they were not going to get far if they followed that lead. There was a challenge in Garry's voice which too closely resembled a snarl. "Why--no." The pre-occupied note was uppermost in his answer. "I'd not mind at all." But he offered no more than that. "Nor the reason why you've been so insistent that I stay on up here?" "Why not? I've not forgotten my manners, even though I've lived some months in the back-brush!" No attempt at levity, however, could parry the other's deliberate insolence. Garry worked nearer to what had lain all day behind his bad silence. "A man is wasting his time trying to reform another man," he vouchsafed, "if that other man has no desire for reformation." "That is very, very true," Steve agreed with even gravity. "Unless that man has the desire within himself, he need never waste his time even hoping to come back!"