Those who wanted it, knew it; those who passed it by, gave it no offense.
Collinson himself stood by the door, smoking a contemplative pipe.

As they rode up, he disengaged himself from the doorpost listlessly, walked slowly towards them, said reflectively to the leader, "I've been thinking with you that a vote for Thompson is a vote thrown away," and prepared to lead the horses towards the water tank.

He had parted with them over twelve hours before, but his air of simply renewing a recently interrupted conversation was too common a circumstance to attract their notice.

They knew, and he knew, that no one else had passed that way since he had last spoken; that the same sun had swung silently above him and the unchanged landscape, and there had been no interruption nor diversion to his monotonous thought.

The wilderness annihilates time and space with the grim pathos of patience.
Nevertheless he smiled.