Notwithstanding the late carousal of the previous night, the morning found the men early astir. Rentoul awoke only half sober, and had to sharpen his faculties with a nip before he rose, and, despite his overnight homily on personal cleanliness, wiped the dust from his hair and beard with a grimy hand and sat down to breakfast unwashed. In the clear light of day they were a rough, strangely assorted lot; only the older man, Graves, with his air of distinction and education, stood out from the rest, like a man-of-war among a flotilla of "tramps"--but a man-of-war that has been in battle and come out of it badly damaged. "Rum go, our meeting again, like this," he said to Lawless, while they stood in the sunshine together and watched the others inspanning the mules. "I'd ask you to make a return call, only,"--he lifted his shoulders and smiled--"I'm a descendant of Cain--a wanderer upon the earth. I'll own my six feet some day, I suppose, and come to anchor." Lawless glanced at the speaker with interest. "I'm something of a rolling stone myself," he answered. "I doubt I shall ever lay claim to greater acreage than you." "Ah!" Graves stroked the back of his head reflectively, and stared vaguely away into space. "Failures!" he muttered... "Eh?... And to think of some of the fellows who're on top!" "It's another form of selfishness, theirs," Lawless replied. "They've gone for the one thing, and stuck to it. A single idea would never satisfy either you or me. One man takes Wealth for his mistress; another, being polygamous, goes for a bevy of mistresses that we may bring under a common heading--Pleasure. The fool pursues Ambition, and the sentimentalist his Ideal... And when it comes to the finish--as Rentoul says--who shall say which man's skull it is he turns up?" Graves nodded assent. "And yet," he said--"a man's talents... It seems rotten things should pan out like that. I was never a white-haired boy exactly, but I had ideas once of doing something... Rot, of course--damned rot! And queer, too, how ideas run to seed before they fruit. I tell you a man needs to be ever on the alert, watching his ideas to prevent the growth exceeding the vitality. We don't prune and tend enough. We're so proud of our ideas that we let 'em run up rank and weedy, till they seed before time. It's the man with the strength of mind to nip the young shoots and exert patience who sees the fruition of his ideas." "I confess I don't understand," said Lawless, "how you came to allow all yours to seed. With men like those," and he waved his hand in the direction of the swearing, noisy group hitching the mules to the disselboom with many loud and unnecessary oaths, "it's easy of comprehension. But--" Graves filled in the pause with a laugh. "Ah well!" he returned... "Who can say? The secret to the riddle lies in what you spoke of just now... I'm a polygamist." CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.