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Updated: July 8, 2025
"What sort is she, Steve?" "She come up to Gaynor's place along with Gratton," answered Jarrold as though he knew all about her. "He was crazy gone on her, crazy enough to want to marry her, even. Sent me for the judge. Then Mark King showed up. She fell for him and gave Gratton the go-by. Then she comes into the mountains with King, I guess. Next she gets tired of him and goes back to Gratton."
He had opened the packet, ripping off the old encasement of cloth. There was a book, a Bible that looked to be centuries old, battered, the covers gone; Gaynor's letter was slipped into it: "DEAR MARK: "Honeycutt's dead. I've got his secret. But Brodie came near doing me in. Honeycutt, dying, sent for me. I got there just in time. He gave me the Bible; it was the "parson's" and then Gus Ingle's.
Now I'd gamble my life on it." Gaynor's mouth tightened and his eyes flashed. "Between you and me, Mark," he said in a voice which dropped confidentially, "I'd like mighty well to have my share right now. I've gone in pretty deep here of late, a little over my head, it begins to look. I've branched out where I would have better played my own game and been content with things as they were going.
The architecture of Loose End was entirely the invention of John Twist. It consisted of a chain of eight rooms. As the family grew, another room was leaned against the last one. One of the boys at Gaynor's had been heard to express the opinion that Loose End would, some day, reach right across the Continent.... The middle and largest room had two doors at opposite sides. It was the living-room.
The little grey man whom they called "judge," and who had a way of clearing his throat before and after the most trifling remark, went up and down with his hands under his coat-tails, peering near-sightedly at pictures and books and wall-paper. "Quite a tidy little place Ben Gaynor's got here," he said patronizingly. "Quite a tidy little place."
The rosy hue of eager joyousness that had crept into Gaynor's suntanned face vanished; his jaw drooped, and a pathetic look of sheepish apology followed. "That's so," he ejaculated, mournfully; "bot' tumbs up! but it's a pity. Carson's an Irish gintleman, an' if I could till him ye was a gurl, he'd knock the head plumb off any b'y that 'ud bother ye. Ye'd git away well, too."
And, as both had cause to regard the situation, there was so little call for laughter. But they could have no clue to Gloria's thoughts. Her wedding! With that insignificant little grey man in his cheap wrinkled clothes to officiate; with that unshaven, leering, dirty man to witness! Holy matrimony! Gloria Gaynor's wedding!
So masterly a performance, indeed, hardly needed the offset of Miss Gaynor's door-step words "To be so kind to me, how she must have liked you!" though he caught himself wishing it lay within the bounds of fitness to transmit them, as a final tribute, to the one woman he knew who was unfailingly certain to enjoy a good thing.
One time I saw his picture in a paper, where they were giving out meal, where Mrs. Gaynor's is and I kissed the picture of him. They were laughing at me for doing that, but I had heard of his good name.
She adored Ben; you could see that in her quick dark eyes, which were always animated with expression. If she was not more at his side, the matter was simply explained; she adored their daughter Gloria no less, and probably somewhat more, and Gloria needed her. Surely Gaynor's needs, those of a grown man, were less than those of a young girl whose budding youth must be perfected in flower.
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