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Then he turned and went slowly up the stair, and came out on to the open face of that Isle, and he saw that it was waste indeed, and dreadful: a wilderness of black sand and stones and ice-borne rocks, with here and there a little grass growing in the hollows, and here and there a dreary mire where the white-tufted rushes shook in the wind, and here and there stretches of moss blended with red-blossomed sengreen; and otherwhere nought but the wind-bitten creeping willow clinging to the black sand, with a white bleached stick and a leaf or two, and again a stick and a leaf.
The time had come to shut his hand about the work and let his hold be felt. He located the superintendent directing the pouring of concrete in the frames of the dam core, Atkinson, a man of fifty with a stubby gray mustache, a wind-bitten face and a tall angular frame. When Weir joined him he was observing with speculative eyes the indolent movements of a group of Mexican laborers.
My people took me one summer to Dymchurch in Romney Marsh; in those days before the automobile had made the Marsh accessible to the Hythe and Folkestone crowds, it was a little old forgotten silent wind-bitten village crouching under the lee of the great sea wall. At low water there were miles of sand as smooth and shining as the skin of a savage brown woman.
Ain't that so, Cap'n Joab?" Cap'n Joab swallowed hard and nodded; but his wind-bitten face displayed much distress. "I had no idee the gal's father was aboard that schooner with Cap'n Abe." "Why, sure! I forgot it for a minute," Cap'n Amazon said cheerfully. "There, there, my dear. Don't take on so. Abe's with your father, if so be anything has happened the Curlew; and Abe'll take keer o' him.
The house was gone ... replaced by a bay-windowed, jig-sawed horror of the '80s, but the garden still smiled, its quaint fragrance reënforced at the proper season by the belated blossoms of a homesick and wind-bitten magnolia.
The first week of March had given promise of spring and stirred Carol with a thousand desires for lakes and fields and roads. The snow was gone except for filthy woolly patches under trees, the thermometer leaped in a day from wind-bitten chill to itchy warmth.
Then, after a moment she smiled brilliantly into the wind-bitten face of the kneeling man. "It's all over, Robert," she said. "My dear!" he cried thickly; while Nan could not wholly stifle the cry of fear that rose to her lips. "It's all over," repeated the little woman. "All the worry, all the poverty, all the uncertainty, all the hard times." Mr. Sherwood looked startled indeed.
As his silk hat appeared over the Retriever's rail a wind-bitten, bewhiskered, gaunt, hungry-looking semi-savage reached down, grasped him under the arms, snaked him inboard and hugged him to his heart. Silence for a minute, while Cappy Ricks' thin old shoulders shook and heaved as from some internal spasm, and Matt Peasley's big brown hand patted Cappy's back.
They turned among wind-bitten Cornish elms, leaning inland, and Gregory saw among them the glimmer of Les Solitudes. It was a white-walled house with a high-pitched roof of grey shingles, delicately rippling; a house almost rustic, yet more nearly noble, very beautiful; simple, yet unobtrusively adapted to luxury.
He sneered in the direction of the black-haired, coarse-looking man in the cashier's cage. "He hires them girls for five dollars less a week than he'd have to pay union waiters, and he asks no questions." He closed his recital with a wink so full of meaning that Tunis' palm itched to slap him. But the guest's wind-bitten face betrayed no confusion nor further interest.
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