fable and flinched. "Isn't your name--" I cried, and choked, and when I
would have said Ferry, another word slipped out instead. He did not hear
it plainly:

"Cockerel, did you say?"

A sweet color was I. "Yes, that's what I said; Cockerel. Isn't your last
name Cockerel?"

"No," he said, "my last name is Durand." He gave it the French
pronunciation.

"Mine is Smith," I said, and we galloped.

A plague on names! But I was not done with them yet. We met other scouts
coming out of the east, who also gave reports and went on westward,
sometimes through the trackless woods. At a broad cross-road which
spanned the whole State from the Alabama line to the Mississippi River
stood another sergeant, with three men, waiting. They were the last.

Again we galloped alone; and as our horses' hoofs beat drummers' music
out of the round earth our dialogue drifted into confessions of our own
most private theories of conduct, character and creation. Now that this
man's name was not--Cockerel, my heart opened to him and we began to
admit to each other the perplexities of this great, strange thing called
Life. Especially we confessed how every waking hour found us jostled and
torn between two opposite, unappeasable tendencies of soul; one an
upward yearning after everything high and pure, the other a
down-dragging hunger for every base indulgence. I was warmed and fed.
Yet I was pained to find him so steeped in presumptuous error, so