He stopped his cheerful demeanor once he left the Inn, his face becoming somber. The song he was whistling ended on an off key note, as the memories crowded back behind his dark grey eyes.
No need to put up a casual front now, there was no one about to see him, save the horses and the occasional hen who wandered into the stable looking for spilled grain. He was safe with these companions. His bad dreams were not cause for comment among them nor did they care if oft times silence captured him.
It was an effort sometimes to play the easy going man that most in the Inn expected of him. But it was a convenient fiction that slid him through the social interactions his fellow creatures found so necessary for contact. Most wanted no more than this, and he was glad of it.
‘Well, now . . . to work,’ he called to a passing family of ducks waddling down to the nearby pond. The ducklings eyed him as he spoke, and were rewarded with a scolding from their mother, as she hurried them along with a disgruntled quack and a nip at their tail feathers, away from the man.
He carried the wooden trestles from the storage shed at the end of the stable and set them up in the yard. The oak planks he had leaned against the side of the structure already. He hefted one away from its resting place and placed it across the trestle. Retrieving his measuring cord and hard chalk from his vest pocket, he set about marking off the length needed for the shelves . . .
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‘Many are the strange chances of the world,’ said Mithrandir, ‘and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.’
– Gandalf in: The Silmarillion, 'Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age'
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