Lance nodded without a word. He passed the lighted doorway. Beyond it was a butcher shop—for days after he could remember the odor of raw meat from the place, the sight of the carcasses hung up in the frosty winter air. At the corner he turned and walked back. There was no sign of Fuson as he glanced swiftly into the store. On the other side of the way was the vacant lot where he had instructed the boy from the wagon-yard to tie Satan. Lance took the precaution to go down in the shadows and see if the black horse had arrived. He found his mount, the bridle rein looped over a bit of scrubby bush. He examined the 331 saddle and equipments, and found all as it should be. When he came back to the store door and once more glanced in, he descried Fuson's figure, standing, hands behind the back, in the aisle between the counters.
Quietly, neither hiding nor displaying himself, Lance entered and made his way down the long room toward the far lighted end. After dark, trade in the main portion of the store was practically dead, and only one smoky lamp on the counter illuminated the entrance. In the rear, half-a-dozen men were grouped around a big, rust-red barrel stove, talking. The whole place back there reeked with the odors of whiskey, of the fiery, colorless applejack that comes down from the mountains, kerosene and molasses, with a softening blend from the calico, jeans and unbleached cottons heaped on the counters, narrowing in the approach to this retreat. He paused beside a tall pile of outing flannel, putting up one hand against the rounded edges of their bolts. Fuson, glancing over his shoulder, was aware of the figure in the shadow, and at once spoke in a slightly raised voice.
"Flent, I hear you've sold yo' filly."
"Well, then, you hearn a lie," returned Flenton Hands's tones drawlingly. "I hain't sold that filly, and I'm not aimin' to. That thar nag belongs to my wife."
He laughed uproariously at his own jest, and some of the other 332 men laughed too. Greene Stribling, down from Big Turkey Track to do a bit of trading, had sold a shoat. Instead of getting the coffee and calico and long sweetening it should have purchased, and carrying them, with the remaining money, up to his toil-worn mother and younger brothers and sisters, he had bought a jug of the Derf & Hands wildcat whiskey; and having borrowed the small tin cup from beside the water bucket, he was standing treat to the crowd.
"Fust time I ever heared you had an old woman," Derf said, accepting the cup from the assiduous Stribling.
It was evident, now that Lance had a view of the faces, that this was a Flenton Hands nobody on Turkey Track Mountain ever met. He had, as it were, come out into the open. Certainly he was not drunk; it would have taken a very considerable amount of stimulant to intoxicate that heavy, dense spirit and mentality; but there was color in his cheek, a glint of courage in his pale eye, a warming and freeing of the whole personality, that bore witness to what he had been drinking.
"I reckon you mean the wife that you're a-goin' to have," put in Fuson. "Hit's a good thing to git the pesky old stags like you married off. They have the name of breakin' up families. Bein' a settled man myself in these days, I ain't got no use for such."
Hands turned on him eagerly. 333
"Well, I have shore broke up one family," he declared. "I am a church member and a man that keeps the law; but that thar is a thing I'm not ashamed of."