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The streets, in fact, after his long absence in the East, afforded him much food for thought: the curious smugness of the passers-by; the utterly unending bustle; the fearful medley of miserable, over-driven women, and full-fed men, with leering, bull-beef eyes, whom he saw everywhere in club windows, on their beats, on box seats, on the steps of hotels, discharging dilatory duties; the appalling chaos of hard-eyed, capable dames with defiant clothes, and white-cheeked hunted-looking men; of splendid creatures in their cabs, and cadging creatures in their broken hats the callousness and the monotony!
Shrinking from the clamouring tumult of his thoughts he looked around, hard-eyed and drawn of mouth, to find Miss Erroll riding a length in advance, her gaze fixed resolutely between her horse's ears. How much had she noticed?
When a Chinese merchant wants a wife he usually visits a house of prostitution, selects one of the inmates, drives a hard bargain with the hard-eyed mistress of the establishment, and, the transaction concluded, brusquely tells the girl to pack her belongings and accompany him to his home. I might add that the girls thus chosen invariably make good wives and remain faithful to their husbands.
Few of the actual frontiersmen were aware of the wrongs of the red men. The young man's hands fell from her arms. Hard-eyed and grim, he looked her over from head to foot. The short skirt and smock of buckskin, the moccasins of buffalo hide, all dusty and travel-stained, told of life in a primitive country under the simplest and hardest conditions.
Jimmy, scarcely knowing what sort of reception to expect, had come in white-faced and hard-eyed, but the elder man's handshake eased his mind at once. Fenton led the way into the smoking-room, selected a couple of chairs in the further corner, then held out his cigar case. "Have a smoke?" he said.
"Fear not," I said, "I am a master of my craft. Or, if thou dost fear, cast this poison forth and live. In Rome thou mayst still find happiness; ay, in Rome, where thou shalt walk in Cæsar's triumph, while the laughter of the hard-eyed Latin women shall chime down the music of thy golden chains." "Nay, I will die, Olympus. Oh, if one would but show the path."
The English girls having sat out two meal-times with her, had ceased the hard-eyed observation which had made the long silence of the earlier repasts only less embarrassing than Fraulein's questions about England.
After Elsie had been freed from her dangerous prison in Dead Hole he could take time to search for a feasible route to the mine. Toward sundown the old Navaho led the party clear of the shattered rock maze and up the side of a small mesa. From the table top Lennon saw the mighty towers of Triple Butte startlingly close ahead. Slade reined in to stare hard-eyed at the engineer.
No hard-eyed nurses and physicians with their array of bottles, no hypocrites snuffling sympathy while dreaming of fat legacies, no pious mummeries, only the innocent things direct from the hand of God, unstained by human sin and training, trees and bushes and flowers, the tender living things about, the voiceless and passionless music of lonely nature, the hearty sun, and the maternal embrace of the sweet waters.
"I'd take it." Mrs. De Peyster had a moment's picture of Matilda's laying the pearl before a pawnbroker and asking for a fraction of its worth, a mere thousand or two; and of the hard-eyed usurer glancing at it, announcing that the pearl was spoof, and offering fifty cents upon it. "Matilda, you should know that I would not part with such an heirloom," she said rebukingly.
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