And the queer head looked round the vacant bar with an air of virtuous defiance, as though anxious to meet the eye of any so bold as to contradict.
It was anything but a clean face on the head, and it was overshadowed by a very greasy wideawake hat. Grubbiness and unhealthy redness contended for mastery in the features, of which the nose was the most surprising, wide and bulbous and knobbed all over; so that ever afterward, in any attempt to look Mr. Cripps in the face, I found myself wholly disregarding his eyes, and fixing a fascinated gaze on his nose; and I could never recall his face to memory as I recalled another, but always as a Nose, garnished with a fringe of inferior features. The face had been shaved—apparently about a week before; and by the sides hung long hair, dirtier to look at than the rest of the apparition.
My grandfather gave no more than a glance in the direction of this little man, passed the counter and re-joined me, pulling off his coat as he came. Something of my tingling eyes and screwed mouth was visible, I suppose, for he stooped as he rolled up his shirt-sleeves and said: "Why, Stevy boy, what's amiss?"
"You—you—hurt the man's ear," I said, with a choke and a sniff; for till then Grandfather Nat had seemed to me the kindest man in the world.
Grandfather Nat looked mightily astonished. He left his shirt-sleeve where it was, and thrust his fingers up in his hair behind, through the grey and out at the brown on top. "What?" he said. "Hurt 'im? Hurt 'im? Why, s'pose I did? He ain't a friend o' yours, is he, young 'un?"
I shook my head and blinked. There was a gleam of amusement in my grandfather's grim face as he sat in a chair and took me between his knees. "Hurt 'im?" he repeated. "Why, Lord love ye, I'd get hurt if I didn't hurt some of 'em, now an' then. They're a rough lot—a bitter bad lot round here, an' it's hurt or be hurt with them, Stevy. I got to frighten 'em, my boy—an' I do it, too."
I was passing my fingers to and fro in the matted hair on my grandfather's arm, and thinking. He seemed a very terrible man now, and perhaps something of a hero; for, young as I was, I was a boy. So presently I said, "Did you ever kill a man, Gran'fa' Nat?"