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As Lennon scrambled up and through the deep entrance after her he glimpsed a thin gray face, with bleary red eyes and loose lips, leering at him out of the darkness of an inner room. To the right, a little way back from the next opening, a small fair-haired girl was rapidly winding in on a miner's windlass. She stopped to tug at a rope.
The benches about me were filled with bleary, unshaven men; some asleep, others trying hard to keep awake; each clutching a paper which presently it seemed they might devour, goat-like, in sheer hunger. The stamp of cruel want convulsed each hopeless face, and crowsfeet lines of despair lay as a delta beneath each fishy eye.
The man looked at me; his weak eyes were each covered with a film which gave them a glassy appearance; his gaze grew bleary, and made a disgusting impression on me. "You are a stranger here?" he said. "Yes." Could he not even read the name of the paper he held in his hand? "Barely." For that matter, he could hear directly that I was a stranger. There was something in my accent which told him.
He got to his feet, shaking himself, rubbed his eyes sleepily, and took from her hand the dead branch which she was dragging to the fire. Between them they awoke Cleofonte, who lumbered to his feet and stared about with bleary eyes. "Bon giorno, Signora Signor. I have slept oh, what sleep! Luigi! Up with you. Dio! It is already day." Immediately the camp was in commotion.
Haney found himself sprawling on the floor, and looked up, with a pleading, piteous expression. His eyes were still red and bleary, his motley face shot with purple, and the fumes of the liquor still clouded his brain. The chief stood above him with clenched fist. "On the level, Boss, I don't know," he whined. "Get up!" commanded the chief. Haney struggled to his feet and dropped into his chair.
Once, when a boy, in one of his perambulations through several of the surrounding towns, he had passed a village "lock-up," as the town prisons were then called a small, square, gray building with long iron-barred windows, and he had seen, at one of these rather depressing apertures on the second floor, a none too prepossessing drunkard or town ne'er-do-well who looked down on him with bleary eyes, unkempt hair, and a sodden, waxy, pallid face, and called for it was summer and the jail window was open: "Hey, sonny, get me a plug of tobacco, will you?"
I never left my door open when I knew her to be at home. But this, after all, was a very rare occurrence. Sometimes I chanced to meet her on the staircase or in the yard, and she would smile upon me with a smile which seemed to me to be sly and cynical. Occasionally, I saw her drunk, with bleary eyes, tousled hair, and a particularly hideous grin. On such occasions she would speak to me.
Barret was, at the time I speak of, close upon seventy years of age, scarcely five feet in height, and even that diminutive stature lessened by a stoop. His face was thin, pointed, and russet-colored; his nose so aquiline as nearly to meet his projecting chin, and his small gray eyes, red and bleary, peered beneath his well-worn cap with a glance of mingled fear and suspicion.
It was true that the old man scarcely represented the usual worthless, criminal type that took to vagabondage. As he paused to scrutinize the convict gang neither insolence nor fear, one of which was certainly to be expected, became manifest in his face. They had anticipated certain words in greeting, a certain look out of bleary, shifty eyes, but neither materialized.
I walked down the stairs. "Good-bye, Comrades!" "Good-bye, a rivederci!" and after giving one last look at the familiar scene, I walked out. As I made my way down the yard leading to the street, I encountered Mrs. Wattles at the back door of her shop. She had now reached the maudlin stage of intoxication. Her eyes were bleary, her mouth tremulous, her complexion bloated and inflamed.
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