The man in armor leaned against a tree and pondered.

“A strange young man, and callous and selfish.  But there is truly something under his shell.  I would relish putting some questions to him.”

Then Jared Chick plunked an ash staff from a pile of hoop-poles left by a chopper and went on his way along shaded woodland paths, avoiding the main highroad.  He decided that it would be better to go by the roundabout way and show himself on the streets of town instead of on a rural turnpike where countrified horses did not take kindly to a real knight-errant.

“It was a good place back there for sleeping,” reflected Walker Farr, remembering the brook, singing over the stones, the whispering alders, the old-fashioned house, and the somnolent landscape.  “That man who has been living there until the day of his emigration has certainly been asleep for a long time and is sleeping soundly now; he is having a wonderful dream.  The nightmare will begin shortly and he will wake up.”

After a time Farr came into a village, a hamlet of small houses which toed the crack of a single street.  It was near the hour of noon and from the open windows of kitchens drifted scents of the dinners which the women were preparing.  All the men of the place seemed to be afield; only women were in sight here and there at back doors, pinning freshly washed garments on lines, beating dust from rugs, or, seen through the windows, were bustling about the forenoon tasks set for patient household slaves in gingham.

At one back door, his back comfortably set against a folded clothes-reel, was a greasily fat tramp, gobbling a hand-out lunch which a housewife had given to him.

Under a little hill where the road dipped at the edge of the hamlet here sounded clink of steel on rock, suggesting that men labored there with trowel and drill.  There was complaining creaking of cordage—­the arm of a derrick sliced a slow arc across the blue sky of June.

The fat tramp held up his empty plate and whined a request and the hand of a woman emerged from a close-by window and placed something in the dish.

Farr slowed his steps and looked at the tramp, and a woman in a yard near by stared over the top of a sheet which she was pinning on the line and scowled at the new arrival.

“I wonder if I’m considered as the Damon of that Pythias?” Farr asked himself, smiling into her frown.  “But Damon is nomad spelled backward!  I wish I dared to ask her for a piece of that pie cooling on the sill.”

Just then, over the clink of metal under the hill, above wail of straining pulley, rose the screech of a man in agony, the raucous male squall whose timbre is more hideous than the death-cry of swine.

Then came a man running from the valley under the hill.

“It’s your husband, Mrs. Jose,” he panted, turning in at the house where the fat tramp ate with his back against the clothes-reel.  “You better go!  I’ll telephone for a doctor.”