And he was Elijah Huddlestone; he had sold her things at Mr. Pock’s general store, he had sold three books to Mrs. Fanning, he was tall and thin and had a black mustache, his mother made dresses for Mrs. Bedford Fanning—all this, and she had not known his voice when she heard it first.

“What good will it do anyone?” asked Bale.

“Good? Good?” His voice went away, fumbling, for awhile. It came back, strong and assured. “Listen to me: if the Butternuts ever get up here, they’ll burn us out of house and home, sure as you’re a foot high. That’s war: burning things, capturing things, taking things from the enemy. We’re enemies—”

Dan said, “I’m not. I don’t wish to be a professional enemy. I’d rather let my emotions decide—I’d rather hate a man because I knew certain elements in him needed hating.”

“Christ Almighty,” gasped Elijah.

“Well,” said Dan, “that’s the way with me, Hud.”

“It don’t need to be. It’s your country.”

“The whole business is our country. The whole shooting-match. Why can’t people realize that? Why do they have to kill part of their country because they love it?”

Huddlestone grunted. “Nobody can talk to you. I doubt if it’s worth it, anyway.”

“Possibly it isn’t.”

The other man said, “Christ” again, and then he was silent.

A match crackled. The flame picked out half of Bale’s profile. He was sitting on the ground beyond the thorn-thicket. Long legs shadowed beside him; Huddlestone was standing. The match went out. Irene could smell charred tobacco, coarse and sweet.

“You want to be a soldier,” Bale said. His tone was very low; barely it reached her ears.

“Why, yes. I—”

“That’s all of it. You were born past your time. Perhaps there used to be some sense in war, but there isn’t any more.”

Huddlestone laughed. “I guess you were born ’way ahead of your time, Dan. Nobody else seems to see it your way.”

“Maybe I was … It looks as if it were something neither of us could help.” He said, “I know. You dream about it at night. It’s a kind of longing which dwells all around you and slips in and takes possession, once you let your mind be unoccupied. I’ve had it, about other things. I imagined myself a great philosopher. Plato, Plotinus, Jesus Christ, John Locke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Bale. You drew something from the Greeks and bolstered it up with an Asiatic notion, and proved it by Dan Bale! I’d put it all in books, this distilled philosophy. They’d study me in universities.”

Huddlestone muttered an obscene word.

“It’s all of that,” Bale said. “It was a boy’s dream. I’ve got over it, more rapidly than you ever got over yours.”