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Updated: July 28, 2025
Slovenly and depressing at noonday, it seemed now frankly to have flung off its mask. Dusk was gathering, and with it a smoke-stained fog that lent a sickly tinge to the lights. Women slunk by him: the saloons, apparently closed, and many houses with veiled windows betrayed secret and sinister gleams.
He appeared to trust Winter, up to a point, but evidently found it hard to regain self-control. "Not here!" he whispered. "In five minutes at the Regency Café, Piccadilly. Let me go alone." Winter nodded, and the other darted downstairs. The detective followed slowly. Crossing the street at an angle, he looked up at the smoke-stained elevation of Gloucester Mansions.
Afterwards a German shell landed with its unpleasant noise in the middle of the street; but we had wandered up a by-way, and so escaped it by a minute or less. In a little burned house, where only a piece of blackened wall remained, I found a little crucifix which impressed me very much it stood out against the smoke-stained walls with a sort of grandeur of pity about it.
Their tepees consisted of long poles covered with smoke-stained canvas with two openings, one at the top for a smoke hole and the other at the bottom for a door through which I had to crawl in order to enter.
Only the ceaseless engine-bell, the grime, the sulphurous hellish smoke, the driving rain, the ice and dust, only the endless monotony of ill-smelling, steaming carts, the smoke-stained signal-flag and greasy lantern, only the tottering shanty with the two beds, the stove, and the few chairs and table, only the blue-eyed crippled girl who wound her thin arms about his neck.
Andy's loop sank neatly over it a second later, and the two wheeled and dashed away together, with Pink and Irish duplicating their performance at the other end of the tent. The dingy, smoke-stained canvas swayed, toppled, as the pegs gave way, and finally lay flat upon the prairie fifty feet from where it had stood, leaving the inmates exposed to the cruel stare of eight unfriendly cowpunchers.
The week had consisted of the kind of thing that might be expected small negligible adventures; work now and then the Major and Frank working side by side a digging job on one day, the carrying of rather dingy smoke-stained hay on another, the scraping of garden-paths that ran round the small pink house of a retired tradesman, who observed them magnificently though a plate-glass window all the while, with a cigar in his teeth, and ultimately gave them ninepence between them.
This is a favourite industry with the women, who make two kinds, one coarse, the other a neat and close article, of rattan-tint until it becomes smoke-stained: the material is so cheap and comfortable, that many of the missionaries prefer it for walls to brick or boarding.
Yet there was nothing there to see no tortured, smoke-stained, throttling face ah! that could not be but neither was there the merry, kindly face, with large cheerful eyes and tender mouth smiling; no hand held the curtains that the face might peer in.
You can envelop yourselves in an atmosphere of moral and intellectual beauty, through which your otherwise plain faces will look forth like those of angels. Beautiful to Ledyard, stiffening in the cold of a northern winter, seemed the diminutive, smoke-stained women of Lapland, who wrapped him in their furs, and ministered to his necessities with kindness and gentle words of compassion.
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