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The scene would have made a good caricature: our travel-tossed party, with draggled skirts, and hats shapeless from much drenching rain; the men coatless, collarless, cuffless, with trousers rolled up and hair guiltless of parting; remnants of provisions, dishes, rugs, shawls, and coats littered over the ground, all in sharp contrast with the perfect type and finished product of civilization landing from the canoe.

The body of Edward Crown was lying where it had fallen. It was covered by a thin blanket of snow. For a long time he stood gazing down upon the lifeless shape. The snow cut his face, the wind threshed about his coatless figure, but he heeded them not. He was muttering to himself. At last he turned to re-enter the house. His daughter was standing in the open doorway.

He had the same nervous, impetuous quickness, and, horrified by the likeness, Clayton watched him sink back into a chair, pipe in mouth, and relapse into a stolidity that seemed incapable of the energy and fire shown scarcely a moment before. His life in the mountains had made him as shaggy as some wild animal. He was coatless, and his trousers of jeans were upheld by a single home-made suspender.

Suddenly Jean caught a glint of moving color through the fringe of brush. Instantly he was strung like a whipcord. Then a tall, hatless and coatless man stepped up in plain sight. The sun shone on his fair, ruffled hair. Daggs! "Hey, you Isbels!" he bawled, in magnificent derisive boldness. "Come out an' fight!" Quick as lightning Jean threw up his rifle and fired.

The rivers were patched and barred with sun-dried pebbles; the logs and loggers were drought-bound somewhere up the Connecticut; and the grass at the side of the track was burned in a hundred places by the sparks from locomotives. Men hatless, coatless, and gasping lay in the shade of that station where only a few months ago the glass stood at 30 below zero.

At a table in one corner two men one tall, darkfaced, coatless, with unbuttoned vest, leather wrist-guards, and a heavy gun loosely buckled about his slim waist; the other thick-set, heavy, red-faced were holding animated conversation over their glasses. That is to say: the thick, red-faced man was animated.

I never remember the whole country to have been so much agitated about any event unless it was the assassination of President Garfield. Well, suppose the mother of Charlie Ross were in some meeting; and that while the preacher was speaking, she happened to look down amongst the audience and see her long lost son. Suppose that he was poor, dirty and ragged, shoeless and coatless, what would she do?

To say that the table "groaned," is to give no idea of its condition. Mrs. Hallowell and six neighbors' wives moved from kitchen to dining-room, replenishing the dishes as fast as their contents diminished, and plying the double row of coatless guests with a most stern and exacting hospitality.

In a little while the affair grew most ludicrous, Faulkner's hatless and coatless men taking to the woods in such dispersed order and so demoralized that a good many prisoners were secured, and those of the enemy who escaped were hunted until dark.

A squad of marines dash from the "barracks" below and line up at the secondary battery guns on the forecastle. Some of the marines are hatless and coatless, and one wiry little private shambles along on one foot. He stumbles against a hatch-coaming and kicks his shoe across the deck. Suddenly an order comes out of the gloom near the main hatch and is carried from gun to gun.