It was the afternoon of the fifth day after they had returned from the second stride that had come to nothing.

In the back yard of the magistrate's office at Xinye (新野), Liu Bei (劉備) was walking his round, as on any afternoon. Guan Yu (關羽) was polishing his Green Dragon Blade (靑龍刀) in the western corner of the yard. Zhang Fei (張飛) was re-carving the shaft of his spear in the eastern corner. From the end of the shaft came the thin, regular sound of a plane shaving wood.

That regular sound broke off. Zhang Fei's right hand laid the plane down. Then he spoke, low. Not a loud voice; yet within the quiet back yard, the line entered Guan Yu's and Liu Bei's ears at the same moment.

"Brother. If you walk that road for nothing one more time, this time I shall go knock upon Wolong's brushwood gate first, myself."

Liu Bei's stride stopped. Guan Yu's right hand stilled upon the face of the Green Dragon Blade. The two of them looked together toward Zhang Fei.

Zhang Fei's face was not flushed. Only, his lips trembled thinly — the tremor of a man who had kept a line inside him for long before it at last came out.

"Yide."

Liu Bei's voice was gentle.

"Your line, today out in the air for the first time, sounds heavy. How long did you keep it inside, across this year?"

Zhang Fei bowed his head. No answer came. Guan Yu laid down the Green Dragon Blade quietly and sat with his hands upon his knees.

"Brother Yunchang, have you perhaps something you wish to say?"

Zhang Fei asked, turning toward Guan Yu. Guan Yu was long silent. Then he answered, low.

"Yide, little brother. Our elder brother's third stride is our elder brother's stride. We are only standing three paces behind him. The seat at the rear sometimes looks longer than the seat at the front; but it must not become a seat that presses the front stride onward."

Zhang Fei drew a large breath. Then he nodded, quietly.

"Brother. Yide has spoken, today, his first complaint. Forgive him. Only, this younger brother has trodden, beneath his own hoofbeats, the dust of your two strides that came to nothing. That dust has come out of the end of my spear-shaft today for the first time. By dawn tomorrow I shall leave this line here in this yard."

Liu Bei laid a hand upon Zhang Fei's shoulder. The weight of the hand was not light.

"Yide. Had your complaint today not come, I might have known the weight of the third stride a little less. Only one who has watched another's stride from three paces behind knows its true weight. Your line today has laid one more measure of weight upon the inside of my third stride."

Guan Yu bowed his head beside them. Zhang Fei did not answer. Instead, he took up the shaft of his spear again and laid the plane to it once more. The plane-sound rang out again in a regular rhythm across the back yard. This rhythm was a little slower than before. Inside that slowed rhythm, Zhang Fei's line of today, now as resolve rather than as complaint, had taken its seat.

That evening, Liu Bei sat alone in the west room of the magistrate's office. The map of Wolonggang (臥龍崗) still lay spread upon the desk. Beneath the brushwood gate upon the map, two dots stood: one from the first stride, one from the second. Liu Bei took up the brush and set down a third dot beside them, in red ink. Beside that dot he wrote eight characters anew.

新春之朝, 第三步發.

On a morning of the new spring, the third stride departs.

He read the eight characters once. Twice. At the third reading, a small smile hung at the corner of his mouth. Within that smile, a measure of the weight of Zhang Fei's afternoon line was hanging together. The line was not taken as disturbance. It was folded into the shape of the resolve itself.

That night, many stars stood above the back yard. Beneath the stars, Zhang Fei's spear-shaft leaned, neat, in the corner of a room. The plane-marks at its end had been carved a little deeper than in the afternoon. Within that deeper place, a single tremor of the line Zhang Fei had let out of his mouth this afternoon was, quietly, lodged together.

There are evenings on which the way a younger brother loves an elder takes, for a moment, the shape of a rebuke. A line that seems a rebuke but is not quite one becomes, sometimes, the wind that pushes an elder one measure further toward his third stride. Zhang Fei's wind this afternoon was that kind of wind. It came out of him not because he had lost patience, but because he had, in silence, finished gathering the weight of his own watching. Silence, in certain men, is a slow accumulation; when at last it speaks, it speaks not to disturb but to strengthen. That was the grammar of this yard tonight.

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