“Prophets of Israel!” exclaimed William
Todd, ruefully, “it wasn’t Eph Watts’s
pistol. Did you see Mr. Harkless? I was up
on them steps when he begun. I don’t believe
he needs as much takin’ care of as we think.”
“Wasn’t it one of them Cross-Roads devils
that knocked his hat off?” asked Judd Bennett.
“I thought I see Bob Skillett run up with a club.”
Harkless threw open the doors behind him; the hall
was empty. “You may come in now,”
he said. “This isn’t my court-house.”
GLAD AFTERNOON: THE GIRL BY THE BLUE TENT-POLE
They walked slowly back along the pike toward the
brick house. The white-ruffed fennel reached
up its dusty yellow heads to touch her skirts as she
passed, and then drooped, satisfied, against the purple
iron-weed at the roadside. In the noonday silence
no cricket chirped nor locust raised its lorn monotone;
the tree shadows mottled the road with blue, and the
level fields seemed to pant out a dazzling breath,
the transparent “heat-waves” that danced
above the low corn and green wheat.
He was stooping very much as they walked; he wanted
to be told that he could look at her for a thousand
years. Her face was rarely and exquisitely modelled,
but, perhaps, just now the salient characteristic of
her beauty (for the salient characteristic seemed to
be a different thing at different times) was the coloring,
a delicate glow under the white skin, that bewitched
him in its seeming a reflection of the rich benediction
of the noonday sun that blazed overhead.
Once he had thought the way to the Briscoe homestead
rather a long walk; but now the distance sped malignantly;
and strolled they never so slow, it was less than
a “young bird’s flutter from a wood.”
With her acquiescence he rolled a cigarette, and she
began to hum lightly the air of a song, a song of
an ineffably gentle, slow movement.
That, and a reference of the morning, and, perhaps,
the smell of his tobacco mingling with the fragrance
of her roses, awoke again the keen reminiscence of
the previous night within him. Clearly outlined
before him rose the high, green slopes and cool cliff-walls
of the coast of Maine, while his old self lazily watched
the sharp little waves through half-closed lids,
the pale smoke of his cigarette blowing out under the
rail of a waxen deck where he lay cushioned.
And again a woman pelted his face with handfuls of
rose-petals and cried: “Up lad and at ’em!
Yonder is Winter Harbor.” Again he sat
in the oak-raftered Casino, breathless with pleasure,
and heard a young girl sing the “Angel’s
Serenade,” a young girl who looked so bravely
unconscious of the big, hushed crowd that listened,
looked so pure and bright and gentle and good, that
he had spoken of her as “Sir Galahad’s
little sister.” He recollected he had been
much taken with this child; but he had not thought
of her from that time to this, he supposed; had almost
forgotten her. No! Her face suddenly stood
out to his view as though he saw her with his physical
eye—a sweet and vivacious child’s
face with light-brown hair and gray eyes and a short
upper lip. . . . And the voice. . . .
