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His high-flung head was bent and his gaze downcast. He struck ruthlessly at the dry stalks of goldenrod on the bank, nodding southward before the prevailing wind. He still was brooding as he approached his cabin; brooding so darkly as to bring over his judgment the dim mists of error and of injustice with their attendant cloud of revenge. A mud-spattered buggy before the door drew his attention.
"Monsieur sends compliments," he said. "Brutus," came my father's voice across the hall, "tell him I will see him as soon as he has finished dressing." He was sitting before his fire, wrapped in a dressing gown of Chinese silk, embroidered with flowers. By the tongs and shovel lay a pair of riding boots, still so wet and mud-spattered that he must have pulled them off within the hour.
"Will you be good enough to hold my horse while I run in there for a minute?" calmly asked the new arrival in town, springing lightly from the mud-spattered buggy. Anderson Crow almost staggered beneath this indignity. The crowd gasped, and then waited breathlessly for the withering process.
In a flurry of bitter abstraction, he floundered into a marsh and emerged mud-spattered and indignant. Briers tore at him. Below the sun-mottled river glided endlessly on in sylvan peace. The other shore looked better. There the wind-bent shag of trees was greener save when, with a hint of rain, the breeze turned up an under-leaf ripple of silver.
Uncle Pros knew not the wonder of his own restoration; but to the girl this man before her was something more than mortal. Her eyes went from the lightly tossed hair on his brow to the mud-spattered boots was he only a human being? What was the strange power he had over life and death and the wandering soul of man?
He determined to search for him, but became dizzy, and, crawling to a bunk, lay back groaning as the dull pain in his head leaped intermittently to blinding stabs of agony. It seemed ages before he heard the quick staccato of hoofs on the road. He raised himself on his elbow as Shoop and Corliss rode up on their mud-spattered and steaming ponies. Sundown called as they dismounted at the corral.
He saw that her throat, where her neck scarf fell loosely away from it, was very round and white. He saw that while her grey riding habit covered her body it hid none of her body's grace and strength and slender youthfulness. While his eyes left hers to note these things her eyes had been as busy, running from the man's close cropped dark hair to his mud-spattered boots.
Since Samson's departure, the troublesome kinsman, too, had been somewhere "down below," holding his railroad job. But the call for protection was imperative. She set the gun out of sight against the mantle-shelf, and, walking over unwillingly, opened the door. The mud-spattered man came in, glancing about him half-furtively, and went to the fireplace. There, he held his hands to the blaze.
In mud-spattered chaps and leather coat, his sombrero on the back of his head, a cigarette hanging from his hard, handsome mouth, Scott leaned easily against the table, eying Judith. Douglas looked from Scott to Judith and from Judith out of the window where beyond the yellow green of rabbit bush that carpeted the valley there lay the green shadow of the Forest Reserve.
Drew clutched the collection to his chest and edged back along the wall, avoiding a spirited fight now in progress in the center of the store. Mud-spattered men came bursting back, wanting to change their now ruined clothing for fresh. Drew stiff-armed one reeling, singing trooper out of his path and was gone before the drunken man could resent such handling.
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