He noted the advantages of the situation in reference to the "lung complaint," feeling a loser in some sort; for he had begun to suspect that the consumptive tendencies of the stranger were a vain pretense, assumed merely to delude the unwary. He could not have doubted long, for when he dismounted and hitched his horse to the rail fence he heard the door of the house open, and as its owner, standing on the threshold in the wind and the gusty rain, called out to him a welcoming "Hello," the word was followed by a series of hacking coughs which told their story as definitely as a medical certificate.
Ben Hanway was not a humane man in any special sense, but he was conscious of haste in concluding the tethering of the animal and in striding across the vacant weed-grown yard striped with the ever-descending rain.
"Ye'd better git in out'n all this wind an' rain," he said in his rough voice. "A power o' dampness in the air."
"No matter. There's no discount on me. Don't take cold nowadays. I've got right well here already."
The passage-way was dark, but the room into which Ben was ushered, illumined by two opposite windows, was as bright as the day would allow. A roaring wood fire in the great chimney-place reinforced the pallid gray light with glancing red and yellow fluctuations. The apartment was comfortable enough, although its uses were evidently multifarious,—partly kitchen, and dining-room, and sitting-room. Its furniture consisted of several plain wooden chairs, a table and crockery, a few books on a shelf, a lounge in the corner, and a rifle, after the manner of the mountaineers, over the mantelpiece. Upon the shelf a cheap clock ticked away the weary minutes of the lonely hours of the long empty days while the valley man abode here, exiled from home and friends and his accustomed sphere, and fought out that hopeless fight for his life.
Ben Hanway gave him a keen, covert stare, as he slowly and clumsily accepted the tendered chair and his host threw another log on the fire. Hanway had seen him previously, when Selwyn testified before the coroner's jury, but to-day he impressed his visitor differently. He was tall and slight, twenty-five years of age, perhaps, with light brown hair, sleek and shining and short, a quick blue eye, a fair complexion with a brilliant flush, and a long mustache. But the bizarre effect produced by this smiling apparition in the jaws of death seemed to Hanway's limited experience curiously enhanced by his attire. Its special peculiarity was an old smoking-jacket, out at the elbows, ragged at the cuffs, and frayed at the silk collar; Hanway had never before seen a man wear a red coat, or such foot-gear as the slipshod embroidered velvet slippers in which he shuffled to a chair and sat down, tilted back, with his hands in the pockets of his gray trousers. To be sure, he could but be grave when testifying before a coroner's jury, but Hanway was hardly prepared for such exuberant cheerfulness as his manner, his attire, and his face seemed to indicate.
"Ain't ye sorter lonesome over hyar?" he ventured.
"You bet your sweet life I am," his host replied unequivocally. A shade crossed his face, and vanished in an instant. "But then," he argued, "I didn't have such a soft thing where I was. I was a clerk—that is, a bookkeeper—on a salary, and I had to work all day, and sometimes nearly all night!"
He belittled his former vocation with airy contempt, as if he did not yearn for it with every fibre of his being,—its utility, its competence, its future. The recollection of the very feel of the fair smooth paper under his hand, the delicate hair-line chirography trailing off so fast from the swift pen, could wring a pang from him. He might even have esteemed an oath more binding sworn on a ledger than on the New Testament.
"And we were a small house, anyway, and the salary was no great shakes," he continued jauntily, to show how little he had to regret.