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Updated: June 8, 2025
The little dog had seemed to be dying, but he too experienced a sort of resuscitation, and while he followed at first but feebly, it was not long before he was at heel again, although Hoxer was swift of foot, making all the speed he might toward his temporary home, the shacks that had been occupied by the construction gang.
Told a lie by accident, did I? Begone, sir, or I'll break your head with this billiard cue!" He had reached the limit as he brandished the cue. He was still agile, vigorous, and it was scarcely possible that Hoxer could escape the blow. He dreaded the indignity indeed more than the hurt.
An extreme revulsion of expectation harassed Hoxer. He had always known that Jeffrey was an exception to the general rule of the few large land-owners in the community, who were wont to conserve and, in fact, to deserve the pose of kindly patron as well as wealthy magnate.
But even Jeffrey, he thought, would not grudge a word to set a matter straight that could cost him nothing and would mean much to the levee-contractor. Though of large experience in levee-building, Hoxer was new to the position of contractor, having been graduated into it, so to speak, from the station of foreman of a construction-gang of Irishmen.
There was more than the flush of the waning western sky on his face. He had already dined, and he was one of those wine-bibbers whom drink does not render genial, "I want to hear no more about it." He turned to the table, and with a skilful cue sent one ball caroming against two others. "But you must hear what I have got to say, Major Jeffrey," protested Hoxer.
The packet, which, as it happened, was already overdue, had been telephoned by the officers at her last landing, and a number of men stood on the guards expectant. Hoxer had ceased to struggle. He looked up at the steamer, his pallid face and wide, distended eyes showing in the cabin lights, as the rowboat pulled alongside.
As there was no abatement of the blows of the boat against the embankment, no reply nor explanation, a shot from the gun of one of the levee-watch came skipping lightsomely over the water as Hoxer was borne exhausted to the bottom of the skiff.
This was the moment, the signal, fatal, final moment, that the levee contractor had come to meet, that placed the period to his own existence. He lived no longer, Hoxer felt. He did not recognize as his own a single action hereafter, a single mental impulse. It was something else, standing here in the red gloaming some foreign entity, cogently reasoning, swiftly acting. Self-defense was it?
Oh, why had he not gone with the rest of the camp! he demanded of an untoward fate; why must he have stayed a day longer to bespeak the correction of an injurious error from that proud, hard man, who, however, had wrought his last injury on earth! Hoxer was sorry, but chiefly for his own plight.
Hoxer disregarded the sarcasm, the contempt in the tone. "I am not trying to rip up an old score, but you said at Winfield's store at the store that I did not build the cross levee on the surveyor's line; that I shortened it " "So you did." "But as if I had shortened the levee for my own profit, when, as you know, it was paid for by the pole " "You tax me with making a false impression?"
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