He had come on
board with a couple of men, but they had gone back to the dock,
and were lost in the crowd. He seemed entirely alone. He leaned
against the deck-railing and gazed intently over the widening
strip of tumbling wafers to the city on the shore. But he did not
see it. Instead, he saw a Canadian farmhouse, a garden and
orchard, and gently sloping meadows hedged in by forest. And up
behind the barn he saw a stony field, where long ago he and his
brother and the neighbor boys had broken the stones for the new
house.
His quick movements, his slim, straight figure, and his bright,
piercing eyes showed he was the same boy who had broken the big
rock in the pasture-field long before. Just the same boy, only
bigger, and more man than boy now, for he wore an air of command
and his thin keen face bore a beard, a deep black, like his hair.
And now he was going away, as he had longed to go, when he was a
boy, and ahead of him lay the big frowning rock, which he must
either break or be broken upon.
He had learned many things since those days when he had scampered
barefoot over the fields, or down the road to school.
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