They were an incurious people with whom he had cast his lot, content with their remoteness, and it was something that here a man could lose himself from questions touching the past, so long as he answered frankly those of the present. It suited McCalloway to seal the back pages and the bearded men evinced no wish to penetrate them.
Before the snow flew the newcomer was to be housed under his own roof-tree, and today in answer to the verbal announcement that he was to have a "working" on the land he had bought, the community was present, armed with hammer and saw, with adze and plane, mobilized under the auspices of Cyrus Spradling who moved, like a shaggy patron saint, among them.
There were men, working shoulder to shoulder, whose enmities were deep and ancient, but who today were restrained by the common spirit of volunteer service to a neighbour. Cyrus had seen to it that the gathering at McCalloway's "house-raising" should not bear the prejudicial colour of partisanship, but that Carrs and Gregories alike should have a hand in the activities which were going robustly forward at the head of Snag Ridge.
Back of Cedar Mountain no architect was available and no builders' union afforded or withheld labour, but every man was carpenter and artisan in his own right, and some were "practiced corner-men" as well.
Through the sun-flooded day with its Indian summer dream along the skyline their axes rang in accompaniment to their homely jests, and the earnest whine of their saws went up with the minors of voices raised in the plaintive strains of folk-lore ballads.
The only wage accepted was food and drink. They would have thought as readily of asking payment for participation in the rough festivities of the "infare" with which the mountain groom brings his bride from her wedding to his own house on a pillion at the back of his saddle.
Tomorrow some of these same men, meeting in the roadway, would perhaps eye each other with suspicion. Riding on, after greetings, they would go with craned necks, neither trusting the other to depart unwatched, but today the rude sanctuary of hospitality to the stranger rested over them and the timbers that went up were raised by the hands of friends and enemies alike.