“I said ’try’!”

“Listen, Razorre,” and he came over to me with lazy, good-natured strength, “I’ll pick you up, take you out, and roll you in the snow, if you don’t keep still.”

“And I’ll try my best to give you a good whipping,” replied I, setting my teeth hard, and glaring at him.

He started at me, grinning.  I put the table between us, and began taking deep breaths to thoroughly oxygenate my blood, so it would help me in my forthcoming grapple with the big, over-grown giant.

He toppled the table over.  We were together.  I kept on breathing like a hard-working bellows, as I wrestled about with him.

He seized me by the right leg and tried to lift me up, carry me out.  I pushed his head back by hooking my fingers under his nose, like a prong.

Then I grabbed him by the seat of the britches and heaved.  And they burst clean up the back like a bean pod....

Unexpectedly Hank flopped on the bench and began to shout with laughter....

My heavy, artificial breathing, like a bellows, for the sake of oxygenating more strength into my muscles, had struck him as being so ludicrous, that he was in high good humour.  I joined in the laughter, struck in the same way.

“I surrender, Razorre, and I’ll promise to be decent at the table—­you skinny, crazy, old poet!”

And he rumbled and thundered again with Brobdingnagian mirth.

* * * * *

Back from the lumber camp.  Comparatively milder weather, but still the farmers we passed on the road were startled by my summery attire.  But by this time the lumber-jacks and I were on terms of proven friendship ...  I had told them yarns, and had listened to their yarns, in turn ... the stories of their lives ... and their joys and troubles....

I was reported to Spalton as having been a first-rate cook.

I went to work in the bindery again.

* * * * *

Every day seemed to bring a new “eccentric” to join our colony.  I have hardly begun to enumerate the prime ones, yet....

But when I returned to the little settlement a curious man had already established himself ... one who was called by Spalton, in tender ridicule, Gabby Jack ... that was Spalton’s nickname for him ... and it stuck, because it was so appropriate.  Jack was a pilgrim in search of Utopia.  And he was straightway convinced, wholly and completely, that he had found it in Eos.  To him Spalton was the one and undoubted prophet of God, the high priest of Truth.

Gabby Jack was a “j’iner.”  From his huge, ornate, gold watch-chain hung three or four bejewelled insignia of secret societies that he was a member of.  He wore a flowered waistcoat ... an enormous seal-ring, together with other rings.

He had laid aside a competence, by working his way from journeyman carpenter to an independent builder of frame houses, in some thriving town in the Middle West ... where, in his fifty-fifth year, he had received the call to go forth in quest of the Ideal, the One Truth.