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Gordon Makimmon had known Lettice Hollidew, now speaking in little, girlish rushes behind him, since her first appearance in a baby carriage, nineteen or twenty years back.
In the crises of life and death, or under the desire for immediate and more liquor, they sold necessary slices. This continued until nothing remained for the present Gordon Makimmon but the original dwelling now grotesquely misshapen from the addition of casual sheds and extensions and a small number of acres on the outskirts of town. There he lived with Clare, his sister.
A smooth, conical hill rose sharply to the left, momentarily shutting out the valley; and beyond, at the foot of a steep declivity, stood the Makimmon dwelling. Originally a four-square, log house, the logs had been covered by boards, and to its present, irregular length, one room in width, had been added an uneven roofed porch broadside on a narrow lip of sod by a wide, shallow stream.
He remembered Edgar Crandall's arraignment of the County as "the littlest, meanest place on earth," a place where a man who wanted his own, his chance, was helpless to survive the avarice of a few individuals, the avarice for gold. He had asked him, Gordon Makimmon, to give him that chance. But, obviously, it was impossible ... absurd.
"Are they going to cut at me?" she asked. The lie on his lips perished silently before her grave tones. "It's not rightly a dangerous operation," he protested; "thousands come out of it every year." "Gordon, I'm afeared of it." "No, you're not, Clare Makimmon; there's not a drop of fear in you."
He was, for a heavy man, active; and, before Gordon Makimmon could put out a protective arm, he returned the latter to the perpendicular with a jarring blow on the chin. Jake whipped out from a place of concealment on his person a plaited leather weapon with a globular end. It was Jake, Gordon instinctively knew, who threatened him most; he could easily stop the hulking shape before him.
Buckley Simmons, crouching low over the table, consumed his dinner with formless, guttural approbation. The place above his forehead, where he had been struck by the stone, was puckered and dark. He raised his eyes the unquenchable hatred of Gordon Makimmon flared momentarily on his vacuous countenance like the flame of a match lit in the wind.
He bent and picked the other up. Rutherford Berry's arms hung limply over Sim's grasp, his feet dragged heavily, in unexpected angles, over the floor. "Coming, Gord?" Gordon made no reply. He sat intent upon the jug before him. Simeon considerately shut the door. At regular intervals Gordon Makimmon took a long drink.
He greeted Gordon Makimmon cordially, waving him to a seat. Valentine Simmons never, apparently, changed; his countenance was always freshly pink, the tufts of hair above his ears like combed lamb's wool; his shirt with its single, visible blue button never lacked its immaculate gloss. "You're looking as jaunty as a man should with the choice of the land before him.
Their mother, the widow of that Makimmon whose disputatious temper had been dignified by the epitaph of "heroic sacrifice," had died of a complicity of patent medicines the winter before.
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