“You know how it is, Willy,” he said, blinking his reddened eyelids.  “You kind of wish sometimes that you had somebody to help you bear your burden, and then it’s taken away, but you’re kind of bent over and used to it.  And you’d give your neck and all to have it back.”

Willy Cameron pondered that on his way up the street.

There was one great longing in him, to see Lily again.  In a few hours now he would have taken a wife, and whatever travesty of marriage resulted, he would have to keep away from Lily.  He meant to play square with Edith.

He wondered if it would hurt Lily to see him, remind her of things she must be trying to forget.  He decided in the end that it would hurt her, so he did not go.  But he walked, on his way to see Pink Denslow at the temporary bank, through a corner of the park near the house, and took a sort of formal and heart-breaking farewell of her.

Time had been when life had seemed only a long, long trail, with Lily at the end of it somewhere, like water to the thirsty traveler, or home to the wanderer; like a camp fire at night.  But now, life seemed to him a broad highway, infinitely crowded, down which he must move, surrounded yet alone.

But at least he could walk in the middle of the road, in the sunlight.  It was the weaklings who were crowded to the side.  He threw up his head.

It had never occurred to him that he was in any, danger, either from Louis Akers or from the unseen enemy he was fighting.  He had a curious lack of physical fear.  But once or twice that day, as he went about, he happened to notice a small man, foreign in appearance and shabbily dressed.  He saw him first when he came out of the marriage license office, and again when he entered the bank.

He had decided to tell Pink of his approaching marriage and to ask him to be present.  He meant to tell him the facts.  The intimacy between them was now very close, and he felt that Pink would understand.  He neither wanted nor expected approval, but he did want honesty between them.  He had based his life on honesty.

Yet the thing was curiously hard to lead up to.  It would be hard to set before any outsider the conditions at the Boyd house, or his own sense of obligation to help.  Put into everyday English the whole scheme sounded visionary and mock-heroic.

In the end he did not tell Pink at all, for Pink came in with excitement written large all over him.

“I sent for you,” he said, “because I think we’ve got something at last.  One of our fellows has just been in, that storekeeper I told you about from Friendship, Cusick.  He says he has found out where they’re meeting, back in the hills.  He’s made a map of it.  Look, here’s the town, and here’s the big hill.  Well, behind it, about a mile and a half, there’s a German outfit, a family, with a farm.  They’re using the barn, according to this chap.”

“The barn wouldn’t hold very many of them.”