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An undersized, lean, wizen-faced man, with an immense bald head, as round and smooth and shining as a giant soap-bubble, and a pair of beady black eyes, set close together, so that he resembled a gnome of amazing brain capacity and prodigious power of concentration, sat bent over a writing desk with a huge sheet of cardboard before him, on which he was swiftly drawing geometrical and trigonometrical figures.
He was dressed in his soiled working attire of a collier, the trousers strapped under the knees, and his feet shod in vast clogs. With open throat, small head, great jaws, and bold beady eyes, he looked what he was, the superb brute the brute reckless of all save the instant satisfaction of his desires. He came of a family of colliers, the most debased class in a lawless district.
"There's the gent what kicked me cow," he said, his face white and his eyes burning. The punchers of the Concho laughed. "Jump him!" shouted "Bull" Cassidy. "We'll stand by and see that there's no monkeyin'." Corliss held up his hand. The Mexicans drew together and the age-old hatred for the Gringo burned in their beady eyes. Sundown's thin lips drew tight. "I've a good mind to " he began.
Once, he reined in abruptly, and both stopped. Confronting them, a dozen paces away, was a half-grown red fox. For half a minute, with beady eyes, the wild thing studied them, with twitching sensitive nose reading the messages of the air. Then, velvet-footed, it leapt aside and was gone among the trees. "The son-of-a-gun!" Billy ejaculated.
It was a long thin nose, and on either side was a very sharp black beady eye, which did not set off or improve a thin, wrinkled yellow face, as the owner sauntered by with a roughly-made cigar in his mouth, the smoking of which seemed to necessitate the sucking in of the smoker's cheeks, as he gazed eagerly at the seated party and went on.
"It's magic," she said in fright. "No bird ever acted like that." "It certainly is unusual," he said, and his eyes were puzzled. "I can't make it out." The bird flew toward the officer, and with fluttering wings poised in the air before him, its beady, bright eyes peering directly into his. Then it flew toward the door. When the admiral made no move to follow, the bird repeated the performance.
Outside of this zone of female misery and degradation, there was a belt of masculine stupidity and crime; men with corpulent bodies, bull necks, double chins, pile-driving heads; men of shrunken frames, cadaverous cheeks, deep-set and beady eyes vermin-covered, disease-devoured, hope-deserted.
Kells was white and rapt. Plain to see he had won! Blicky was wild with rage. Jesse Smith sat darker, grimmer, but no longer cool. There was hate in the glance he fastened upon Kells as he bet. Beady Jones and Braverman showed an inflamed and impotent eagerness to take their turn. Budd sat in the game now, and his face wore a terrible look.
Time and again his beady eyes lifted to the steady blue ones, only to drop quickly before their fearless sincerity. He stirred irritably, and a hot impatience with himself drove him so that the moment Scipio finished speaking he broke out at once. "Here," he cried, without the least gentleness, "you're talkin' a heap o' foolishness. I'm a bizness man offerin' a bizness proposition.
At present I am ready to promise that the instant that I can communicate with you without endangering my own combinations, I shall do so." Gregson and Lestrade seemed to be far from satisfied by this assurance, or by the depreciating allusion to the detective police. The former had flushed up to the roots of his flaxen hair, while the other's beady eyes glistened with curiosity and resentment.
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