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Already his heart had revolted against his treachery, and then there came to him the further reflection that he did not know enough to justify suspicion. Was not the stranger furnished with the fullest credentials a letter to Roxby from the Colonel? Perhaps he had allowed his jealousy to endanger the man, to place him in jeopardy even of his life should he resist arrest.
Simeon Roxby had a keen, not unkindly face, and he had that look of extreme intelligence which is entirely distinct from intellectuality, and which one sometimes sees in a minor degree in a very clever dog or a fine horse. One might rely on him to understand instinctively everything one might say to him, even in its subtler aesthetic values, although he had consciously learned little.
And now as Roxby looked at him the suspicion which his kind heart had not been quick to entertain was seized upon by his alert brain. "The cunnel's been fooled somehows," he said to himself. For the look with which John Dundas contemplated the place was not the gaze of him concerned with possible investment with the problems of repair, the details of the glazier and the painter and the plasterer.
"I let the dog hyar ketch my finger whilst feedin' him," he said. His plausible excuse for the ten-penny expression was complete; but he added, his darker mood recurring instantly, "An', Mis' Roxby, I hev put a stop ter them ez hev tuk ter callin' me Em'ly, I hev." The old woman looked up, her small wrinkled mouth round and amazed. "I never called ye Emily," she declared.
Few folks kem this way nowadays, 'thout it air jes' ter ford the creek down along hyar a piece, sence harnts an' sech onlikely critters hev been viewed a-crossin' the foot-bredge. An' it hev got the name o' bein' toler'ble onlucky, too," said Roxby. His interlocutor drew back slightly. He had his own reasons to recoil from the subject of death.
Roxby had seated himself, and with his elbows on his knees he looked up at her with a teasing jocularity, such as one might assume toward a child. "Ye war," he declared, with affected solemnity "ye war 'pologizin' fur not bein' a nephew, an' 'lowed ef ye war a nephew we could go a-huntin' tergether, an' ye could holp me in all my quar'ls an' fights.
But Roxby's eyes, with a certain gleam of excitement, a superstitious dilation, still dwelt upon the bridge at the end of the upward vista. He went on merely from the impetus of the subject. "Yes, sir she seen it a-pacin' of its sorrowful way acrost that bredge, same ez the t'others of the percession o' harnts. 'Twar my niece, Mill'cent brother's darter by name, Mill'cent Roxby.
His companion looked with deepening interest at the bridge, although he followed his guide's surging pathway to the opposite bank. As the two dripping horses struggled up the steep incline he asked, "Did the man with her see the manifestation also?" "He 'lows he did," responded Roxby, equivocally.
"Hed ye 'lowed ter, put up at the old hotel?" asked Roxby, some inherent quickness supplying the lack of a definite answer. For the first time the stranger turned upon him a look more expressive than the casual fragmentary attention with which he had half heeded, half ignored his talk since their first encounter at the railway station.
The answer was good as far as it went. A few days spent in the old hostelry certainly would serve well to acquaint the prospective purchaser with its actual condition and the measures and means needed for its repair; but as Sim Roxby stood there, with the cry of the owl shrilling in the desert air, the lonely red sky, the ominous tilted moon, the doors drearily flapping to and fro as the wind stole into the forlorn and empty place and sped back affrighted, he marvelled at the refuge contemplated.
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