"Snappy work, that!" he called out. "Just thirty-three minutes. I didn't believe it could be done."
Samson's face was mask-like, but, as he surveyed the foreigner, only the ingrained dictates of the country's hospitable code kept out of his eyes a gleam of scorn for this frail member of a sex which should be stalwart.
"Howdy?" he said. Then he added suspiciously: "What mout yer business be in these parts, stranger?"
Lescott gave the odyssey of his wanderings, since he had rented a mule at Hixon and ridden through the country, sketching where the mood prompted and sleeping wherever he found a hospitable roof at the coming of the evening.
"Ye come from over on Crippleshin?" The boy flashed the question with a sudden hardening of the voice, and, when he was affirmatively answered, his eyes contracted and bored searchingly into the stranger's face.
"Where'd ye put up last night?"
"Red Bill Hollman's house, at the mouth of Meeting House Fork; do you know the place?"
Samson's reply was curt.
"I knows hit all right."
There was a moment's pause—rather an awkward pause. Lescott's mind began piecing together fragments of conversation he had heard, until he had assembled a sort of mental jig-saw puzzle.