The idiot put his hands before his eyes, with a hoarse, wheezing moan of horror and remonstrance. The girl looked on with the tranquillity of sanity.
Harshaw could rely only on the superiority of his own intellectual endowments.
“Why, look here, madam,” he said bluffly, rallying his wits, “what do you want of me,—to stay here? I have got no notion of going, I assure you; not till daybreak, anyhow.”
He flung himself into his chair, and looked up at her with an exasperating composure, as if relegating to her all the jeopardy of the initiative and the prerogatives of action.
She quailed before this unexpected submission. She could have had no doubts as to her course had he shown fight; the tall and subsidiary young man also wore an air of sheepish defeat. Harshaw stifled his questions; he gave no sign of the anger that seethed within him, the haunting fear that would not down. He stretched out his booted legs to the warm fire, feeling in the very capacity of motion, in the endowment of sensation, a relief, an appreciated value in sheer life which is the common sequence of escape, and remembering that by this time, but for his quick expedient, he might be in case to never move again. He thrust his broad hat far back on his yellow head, put his hands into his pockets, and looked in his confident fashion about his surroundings, while the woman lowered her weapon, and presently went mechanically about her preparations for supper, evidently attended by some lurking regret for her precipitancy. She looked askance at him now and then, and after a time ventured upon a question.
“Ye say yer name be Harshaw?” she asked.
“I said so,” Harshaw replied. So alert were her suspicions that she fancied significance in the simple phrase. She exchanged a quick glance with the young man, who appeared at once lowering and beset with doubt.
Even Tad apprehended the meaning in the look.
“Ye know my name, ’pears like, better ’n yourn,” he grinned, with a guttural, foolish laugh.
As the boy spoke Harshaw was impressed anew with the change in his fate; the creature of cuffs and curses, who had been the very derision of perverse circumstances, was a marvelous contrast to the well-fed, fat, kindly-tended lad who leered good-humoredly from where he lounged against the great chimney. Yet despite this attestation of benignant impulses harbored here, there was the rifle, which had had such importunate concern for his attention, standing ready at the woman’s right hand.