Horne was a big, solid man of sixty, with jet-black hair under his grey cloth cap, and jet-black, bushy eyebrows raised airily. His neat, black moustache was pushed forward in a mock-careless pout. He walked with great speed, as if engrossed completely in his thoughts, but with an air of picturesque indifference, as if his thoughts were entirely lightsome. At intervals he tugged at his coat sleeves, first one and then the other, a nervous eccentricity of no significance except that it kept his coat cuffs near his elbows, displaying his white shirt sleeves for the amusement of other pedestrians. Beulah never tired of this sexagenarian bachelor. He drove a horse as black as his own hair and demanded the same degree of speed from it as from himself, namely, the limit. When starting on a country call he would jump into his buggy and race to the border of the village, beyond which the journey was made more leisurely, while on his return the whip was not taken from its holder until the houses came in sight. The Beulahite pausing on the street to watch him would remark with a chuckle:
“There goes Doc. Horne, hell-for-leather!”
Mauney left Miss Byrne at the post-office, visited the bank, and drove directly back to the doctor’s, hitching his horse to the lamp-post. The office was a smaller portion of the house at one side, which Mauney approached. He rang the bell.
“Come in out of that!” immediately came the doctor’s heavy voice.
Mauney stepped into an office furnished with several leather chairs, a desk on which reposed a skull, a safe holding on its top a stuffed loon, an open bookcase filled with dusty volumes of various colors, and a phalanx of bottles against one wall from which radiated a strong odor of drugs. He looked about in vain for the doctor.
“Sit down, young fellow!” came a stern command from the adjoining surgery. In a moment or two the big physician bustled out, and, stopping in front of Mauney’s chair, stared down at him savagely as if he were the rankest intruder, meanwhile smoking furiously and surrounding himself with blue cigar smoke.
“Say!” he said, at length, jerking the cigar roughly from his mouth. “Who the devil are you?”
“Mauney Bard!”
“Oh, God, yes! Of course you are. Of course you are!” Horne spluttered, walking impulsively to the bookcase and rivetting his attention on the binding of a book.
“So you’re one of Seth Bard’s curses, eh?” he said, at length, in a preoccupied tone, with his back still turned to Mauney. “Been fighting?”