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You've got to keep in mind that this man was weak, one of those spineless fellows that stronger folks lead around by the nose. Well, they make their getaway at Yuma after Struve has killed a guard. That killing of Dave Long shakes Kinney up a lot, he being no desperado but only a poor lost-dog kind of a guy. Struve notices it and remembers that this fellow weakened before.
He lay there by their extinct fire, with his wistful, lost-dog face upward, and his thick yellow hair unparted as it had always been. The murder had been done from behind. We closed the eyes. "There was no natural harm in him," said the Virginian. "But you must do a thing well in this country."
The receding chin, and coarse, loosely opened mouth, the pale, lifeless eyes set too closely together under a low forehead, with a ragged thatch of dead, mouse-colored hair, and a furtive, sneaking, lost-dog expression, proclaimed him the outcast that he was. The big man eyed Patches as he greeted the Cross-Triangle's foreman. "Howdy, Phil!" "Hello, Nick!" returned Phil coldly. "Howdy, Joe!"
"Three four years later there was a jail break. I got into the hills an' made my getaway. Travelin' by night, I reached Rawlins. From there I came down here with a freight outfit, an' I been here ever since." He stopped. His story was ended. June looked at the slouchy little man with the weak mouth and the skim-milk, lost-dog eyes.
Caleb Brent, looking twenty years older than when Donald had seen him last, sat in an easy chair by the window, gazing with lack-luster eyes out across the bight. He was hopelessly crippled with rheumatism, and his sea-blue eyes still held the same lost-dog wistfulness. "Hello, Caleb!" Donald greeted him cordially. "I've just cleaned up the Sawdust Pile for you.
It was a clearer, steadier, surer thing than he had ever known them to reflect before; all hint of lost-dog sophistication was gone; even the smile that touched his thin, pain-straightened lips was different somehow.
A figure presently stood hesitating in the doorway. James saw an oldish man, gray and stooped with a rather wistful lost-dog expression on his face. "What can I do for you, sir?" he questioned. "Don't you know me?" the stranger asked with a quaver in his voice. The lawyer did not, but some premonition of disaster clutched at his heart. He rose swiftly and closed the door behind his caller.
Once more he turned to scan the lean face turned toward him, far more openly, far more inquisitively, this time. It perplexed him, bewildered him this easy certainty and consciousness of power which had replaced the lost-dog light that had driven the smile from his own lips the night before when he had followed Judge Maynard's beckoning finger.
With the closing of the door the vacuous look slipped from his face like a mask. The loose-lipped, lost-dog expression was gone. He looked once more alert, competent, fit for the emergency. It had been his cue to let his adversary underestimate him. During the long night ride he had had chances to escape, had he desired to do so. But this had been the last thing he wanted.
I could sympathize, too, with the lonely, forlorn, lost-dog feeling that clutched him after it was all over. I could remember how big and forbidding and unfriendly the forest had once looked to me in like circumstances, so that I had felt suddenly thrust outside into empty spaces. Almost was I tempted to intervene; but I liked Dick, and I wanted to do him good.
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