One day I had scarcely reached the end of the hedge when I saw Old Toombs himself, moving toward me down the country road. Though I had never seen him before, I was at no loss to identify him. The first and vital impression he gave me, if I can compress it into a single word, was, I think, force—force. He came stubbing down the country road with a brown hickory stick in his hand which at every step he set vigorously into the soft earth. Though not tall, he gave the impression of being enormously strong. He was thick, solid, firm—thick through the body, thick through the thighs; and his shoulders—what shoulders they were!—round like a maple log; and his great head with its thatching of coarse iron-gray hair, though thrust slightly forward, seemed set immovably upon them.
He presented such a forbidding appearance that I was of two minds about addressing him. Dour he was indeed! Nor shall I ever forget how he looked when I spoke to him. He stopped short there in the road. On his big square nose he wore a pair of curious spring-bowed glasses with black rims. For a moment he looked at me through these glasses, raising his chin a little, and then, deliberately wrinkling his nose, they fell off and dangled at the length of the faded cord by which they were hung. There was something almost uncanny about this peculiar habit of his and of the way in which, afterward, he looked at me from under his bushy gray brows. This was in truth the very man of the neighbourhood portrait.
“I am a new settler here,” I said, “and I've been interested in looking at your wonderful hedge.”
The old man's eyes rested upon me a moment with a mingled look of suspicion and hostility.
“So you've heard o' me,” he said in a high-pitched voice, “and you've heard o' my hedge.”
Again he paused and looked me over. “Well,” he said, with an indescribably harsh, cackling laugh, “I warrant you've heard nothing good o' me down there. I'm a skinflint, ain't I? I'm a hard citizen, ain't I? I grind the faces o' the poor, don't I?”
At first his words were marked by a sort of bitter humour, but as he continued to speak his voice rose higher and higher until it was positively menacing.
There were just two things I could do—haul down the flag and retreat ingloriously, or face the music. With a sudden sense of rising spirits—for such things do not often happen to a man in a quiet country road—I paused a moment, looking him square in the eye.
“Yes,” I said, with great deliberation, “you've given me just about the neighborhood picture of yourself as I have had it. They do say you are a skinflint, yes, and a hard man. They say that you are rich and friendless; they say that while you are a just man, you do not know mercy. These are terrible things to say of any man if they are true.”
I paused. The old man looked for a moment as though he were going to strike me with his stick, but he neither stirred nor spoke. It was evidently a wholly new experience for him.