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Updated: June 18, 2025
The thought suddenly occurred to me that, for some reason, he was more afraid of me than I of him. And if I met him on the same ground he was of the disposition to give way first. "You can see my authority, Coombs, any time you are ready to exhibit your own," I returned coolly, leaning back against the side of the cabin, and staring him straight in the eyes.
He was a miserable Yankee runt, an' I did n't hurt the cuss none to speak of. What yer askin' all this fer enyhow," he questioned anxiously, "an' a drawin' that gun on me?" "It seemed to be the only available method for extracting information. Pardon my insistence, Coombs, but was n't that dead man up there the fellow Neale sent?"
The cracked voice of Sallie came to us up the stairs, the unexpected sound startling both. "I reckon you all better com' down an' eat." She stood in the light of the front door watching us, and we descended the flight of steps without exchanging a word. The woman turned and walked in advance into the dining-room. "Where is Coombs?" I asked, looking about curiously.
A vast, sweet, diamond-twinkling freshness filled the Moor; blue shadows lay in the dewy coombs, and sun-fires gleamed along the heather ridges. No heath-bell as yet had budded, but the flame of the whins splashed many undulations, and the tender foliage of the whortleberry, where it grew on exposed granite, was nearly scarlet and flashed jewel-bright in the rich texture of the waste.
"Not unless it gets rough," replied Henry Burns, with a sly wink at Harvey. The three jumped aboard, and Coombs, with something like a grin at his partner, shoved the boat's head off. He had got the jib and mainsail up, and they caught what little breeze there was stirring. The Flyaway drew away from the landing.
But the great New Forest hardly raised her sweeping skirts of black and purple shadow. Mr. Bittacy, however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness of trees within. He knew all the purple coombs splashed with yellow waves of gorse; sweet with juniper and myrtle, and gleaming with clear and dark-eyed pools that watched the sky.
And somehow it struck me at the time that there was a familiar cowboy yell about it." "Old Hank Coombs, perhaps, Frank?" suggested the other lad, quickly. "That was on my mind, Bob. You know history often repeats itself. Once before, just when we seemed to need Hank the worst way, he came riding along as if he had heard us call.
Bangs insisted that they should go over and have a treat at his expense. "You don't have to start till four o'clock," he urged. "You've got plenty of time." And they needed no great amount of persuasion. "Funny old place Coombs keeps," he remarked, as they walked from the camps over to the landing. "All sorts of queer people drop in there over night.
Even Bob, greenhorn as he was, so far as Western ways were concerned, understood the need of care when approaching a camp that might be occupied by enemies. And as for Frank, he had not been in the company of an old ranger like Hank Coombs many times without learning considerable.
This little orchard, without a path through it, without a border, or a parterre, or a terrace, is a place to sit down and dream in, notwithstanding that it touches the road, for thus left to itself it has acquired an atmosphere of peace and stillness such as belongs to and grows up in woods and far-away coombs of the hills.
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