"Whim. Old men like to show up on such occasions. They are next of kin to funerals, feel their dust shaking on their bones when anybody dies."
"There he comes now!" exclaimed Acres.
The Judge was indeed approaching, walking smartly up the street to the National Bank Building. He was one of those old men who somehow recall a cavalry sword, slightly bent, of exceedingly good metal. He retained, you might say, merely the skin and bones of a splendid countenance. The skin was brown as parchment, and wrinkled, but the bones were elegant—Hamlet's skull, not Yorick's. His eyes were perfectly round, gray below a kind of yellow brilliance, as if an old eagle within looked out beneath the steel bars of those bristling brows. His nose belonged to the colonial period of American history. It was an antique, and a very fine one, well preserved, high bridge, straight, with thin nostrils which drew up at the corners to hold the singularly patient whimsical smile in place which his mouth made. All told, the Judge's countenance was one of those de luxe histories of a gentleman not often seen outside of the best literature, but sometimes seen in an old Southern town where some gentleman has also managed to retain the exceeding honour of being a man as well.
His long black coat-tails clung as close as a scabbard to his thin legs. He wore a high silk hat and a white carnation in his buttonhole. He looked neither to the right nor to the left. Apparently he was the one man in sight who was not concerned about the question of what had become or would become of the William J. Mosely Estate.
As he approached the Bank Building, a very large red-faced old man with a white moustache and goatee turned his head in the opposite direction, wrinkled his nose, which was naturally Roman and cynical, and grunted. This was Colonel Marshall Adams. He and the Judge did not "speak." They had not spoken to one another in thirty years. This requires great firmness of character when you live within speaking distance in a town where talking is the chief occupation. They both had that—firmness. It was always one of the agreeable sensations in Jordantown to see these two old men come near enough together to exchange a word or a salutation. The sensation consisted in the fact that they never did it.
The Judge tucked his gold-headed cane under his arm and ascended the stairs which led to his office on the floor above the bank. The Colonel went off, rumbling through his Roman nose, down the street. He did not walk, he paced, as if he were stepping upon pismires, with his feet wide apart. This was due to the fact that so much of the time walking was a matter of carefully balancing himself against the strange unsteadiness, the heaving and rolling of the ground beneath him. And this was due in turn to the fact that the Colonel was never himself except when he was "not himself," but had been exalted about four fingers in a glass above the level of the common man—a condition which has always affected the flat permanency of the earth, often causing it to rise unaccountably before such persons, to meet them even more than halfway. The Colonel had had long experience in this matter, and he walked warily from force of habit even when he was sober.
The difference between Judge Regis and Colonel Adams was this: when the Judge perceived that he was about to meet the Colonel face to face, he never turned aside. But when the Colonel perceived that he was about to meet the Judge, he always did. It was the way each of them had of expressing his contempt for the other.
As the Colonel negotiated himself around the next corner with the rotary motion of a slightly inebriate straddle-legged old planet, he almost collided with another body which was more nearly spherical and which had apparently no legs at all, only two wide-toed "Old Lady's Comforts" showing beneath the hem of her dress. These toes were now set far apart. The very short old lady above them seemed to have caved in above the waistline, but below it she was globular to a remarkable degree. Her face was wrinkled like fine script and very florid. Her upper lip was delicately crimped and sunken. Her lower lip stuck out and reached up in an effort to meet the situation, the situation being more and longer teeth in the lower jaw. Her nose was that of a girl, retroussé, still impertinent.
She stood regarding the Colonel with that contradictory uplook of her faded blue eyes which was pathetic, and that tilt of her nose which was offensive, with her lips primped tight after the manner of a woman who is getting ready to wash behind the ears of a small boy. She always put the Colonel in this class when she looked at him, and he resented it. He resented it now by removing his Kentucky Colonel straw hat and glaring his bow at her, as if that was a concession he made to his own dignity, not to her.
"Good afternoon, Colonel Adams! Well, who are you running from now?" she said by way of seizing his ears.