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Pauline began to scrutinize half suspiciously this remarkable menial, but he kept stolidly at work at the potatoes, and his dark skin, his scraggly beard, his bagging trousers upturned over bare feet, his general dilapidation of appearance, proved him nothing but one of the common derelicts of the languid islands.
Outside, the flakes had ceased and the sinister-looking side street lay in a white hush, a single line of scraggly footsteps crunched into the snow of the sidewalk. A clock from a sky-scraping tower rang out eight, its echoes singing like anvils in the sharp, thin air. On the cross-town street the shops were full of light and activity, crowds wedging in and out.
Her face was still turned in the direction of the church on the outskirts of the scraggly mountain town, and whose spire pricked through the dark green piñons surrounding it. "I ain't fixed I ain't never fixed now." And she glanced down along her unbuttoned jacket, over the faded delaine dress, to her shoes tied with strings held together by countless knots.
"Exercisin'," said Calumet; "takin' my midnight constitutional." He looked at the man with the rifle. The latter was hatless. Long gray hair, unkempt, touched his shoulders; a white beard, scraggly, dirty, hid all of his face except the beak-like, awry nose. Beady, viciously glowing eyes gleamed out of the grotesque mask. "Who's your friend?" questioned Calumet, with a derisive grin.
The tin soldier jumped out of bed and ran over to Fido's basket, his tin feet clicking on the floor as he went. "He is not here," he said. "When I was sitting in the window about noon-time," said the Indian doll, "I saw Fido and a yellow scraggly dog playing out on the lawn and they ran out through a hole in the fence!" "That was Priscilla's dog, Peterkins!" said the French doll.
He left the lad at liberty to spend the rest of the day as he chose, and, early in the afternoon, he proposed to his sister that they should engage in that old game of "jackstones" with which I am sure you are familiar. Years ago the country lads and lassies generally used little bits of stones, instead of scraggly, jagged pieces of iron, with which they amuse themselves in these days.
There was a third member of the Brunell household whom Morrow had observed frequently seated upon the doorstep, or on one of the lower window sills a small, scraggly black kitten, with stiff outstanding fur, and an absurdly belligerent attitude whenever a dog chanced to pass through the lane.
"I wonder if the programs got down in time," said Tom, and then he laughed to think of himself, the chairman of the Ball committee, plodding along the splintered dock in a dusty uniform and buff leggings and with the rudiments of a scraggly beard on his face. It was a queer ending. Down there, the others were floating round, now, to high-priced music from town.
Long before noon on the following day, after a comfortless ride on a bumping train, the boys found themselves at San Jose, a scraggly town on the west shore of beautiful Lake de Patos. As they were both hungry and tired, they secured rooms in a little hotel, ordered dinner served there, and rested for a short time. The dinner was plentiful, but thoroughly Mexican.
Fifteen minutes later, two children and a dog arrived hot and panting at the entrance to the old burying ground. On a high sand dune, covered with thin patches of beach and poverty grass, and a sparse growth of scraggly pines, it was a desolate spot at any time, and now doubly so in the gathering twilight.
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