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"I am thinking," said Judith wonderingly, "that I never quite did you justice, Pollock Hampton!" Hampton's captive, known to them only as Shorty, a heavy, surly man whose small, close-set eyes burned evilly under his pale brows, rode that night between Hampton and Judith down to the ranch-house. He maintained a stubborn silence after the first outburst of rage.
Tressilvain stood absolutely still, his close-set eyes fairly starting from his face, in which not a vestige of colour now remained; and when at length he left the room he left so noiselessly that Malcourt did not hear him.
And thereat he wrought, and set up the deckings, fitting them to the close-set uprights, and finished them off with long gunwales, and there he set a mast, and a yard-arm fitted thereto, and moreover he made him a rudder to guide the craft. And he fenced it with wattled osier withies from stem to stern, to be a bulwark against the wave, and piled up wood to back them.
There were the main building itself, silent, impressive in towering majesty; subordinate chapels and dwellings for priests, a huge smoke-stained refectory, the low nunnery in its spreading gardens and, down the northern slope of the hill, the cemetery, a lichen-growth, as it were, of bristling, close-set tombs in gray stone, the splintered regularity broken in places by the tall rounded column of a priest's grave, set in a ring of wooden sotoba.
"To a little island well beknown to the Fraternity, comrade that is three islands close-set and called Foremast, Main and Mizzen islands, amigo, where we are apt to meet friends, as I say, and sure to find good store of food and the like, brother. Though to be sure this boat is right well equipped, both for victuals and weapons." "And when are we like to reach these islands?"
Far beyond jutted an outlying spur of the Sierra, vast, compact, and silent. Scarcely a hundred yards away, a league-long chasm dropped its sheer walls of granite a thousand feet. On every side rose up the serried ranks of pine-trees, in whose close-set files centuries of storm and change had wrought no breach.
And now, his huge gaunt form more erect than it had been for years, with a glinting of blue fires in his small and close-set eyes, he was lifting his ancient chant again. "There he goes now listen to him," said William Tarwater. "Nobody at home," laughed Harris Topping, day labourer, husband of Annie Tarwater, and father of her nine children.
But when the school-children came flocking in the next morning, she felt more than repaid for her work. The shop resounded with the “Oh mys,” and “Oh looks,” of their surprise and delight. Indeed, the room seemed full of twinkling yellow faces. Lines of them grinned in the doorway. Rows of them smirked from the shelves. A frieze, close-set as peas in a pod, grimaced from the molding.
Yet she continued to meet his gaze, for so should apologies be given though the skies fall; and she watched as one fascinated the blood slowly ebb from his close-set face. "Under the circumstances," he said abruptly, "it was hardly a a judicious thing to do. However, let us say no more about it." He turned away from her, obviously unsteadied for all his even voice.
No chattering voices broke the furtive silence that prevailed in this quarter of Beni-Mora. The moonlight was fainter here, obscured by the close-set buildings, and at the moment there was not an Arab in sight.
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