“I'm afraid you'll be even more greatly misunderstood.”
“I don't expect silly old horses to understand me. My appeal is to men.”
Farr sniffed scornfully. “You'd better let men alone,” he advised.
“The world needs pure unselfishness,” insisted Chick.
“The purer it is the more it is misunderstood. I have tested the matter. I know.”
“Then you yourself would not go forth into the world and do good to men, without calculation and without price?”
“I don't think I would,” declared Farr, dryly. “And I am so little interested in the matter that I think you'll have to excuse me from further talk about it. You have just had one illustration in a crude way of how the world misunderstands anything that's out of the ordinary.”
“Not a word. I'm not even able to give myself sensible counsel. Good day to you!”
“Then you do not care for my company longer on the way?”
“I do not. Excuse my bluntness, but these are parlous times for wayfarers and I cannot afford to have a tin can tied to me as I go about.”
“And you are absolutely selfish?” called Chick.
“I think so,” replied Farr from the highway, getting into his stride. “When I see you again I expect you'll be wondering why you ever were altruistic. That will be the case, providing you wear that armor any longer.”
Jared Chick from behind his bush called, appealingly, “But I fear I shall never see thee again and I have some questions to ask of thee!”
“Oh, I promise to look you up somewhere in the world. If you keep on wearing that suit it will be easy to find you.”
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.”