“Do you persist in talking of this?” demanded Isabel.
“Not at all—not at all,” was the humble rejoinder. “It being your desire, the subject shall be dropped immediately. I would merely observe, what an inhuman wretch that man was to deliberately kill his own uncle, and that in the most horrible manner conceivable.”
“If you have come here to jeer and mock at me, you must continue your insults without my presence,” interrupted our heroine, and so saying she entered the house, and quietly closed the door between her and her tormentor.
Jim McCabe ground his teeth with rage. Was this to be the result of the new game he had so hopefully commenced? Did she, then, hate him so bitterly? and was her love for Russell Trafford so great that his death had produced this marked change in her lovely face? But Jim McCabe was not the man to submit thus tamely. He shook his fist at the door which shut the maiden from his view, and muttered:
“This is all very fine, my proud lady, but the time is not far off when you will look at Jim McCabe with a much softer expression in those eyes. I have played none but my loose cards as yet, but there are trumps to follow that are certain to win, and two weeks shall not pass away before I shall have the pleasure of seeing this haughty jade at my feet.”
He hissed the last words through his clenched teeth, and his usually red face grew still redder with anger.
He was walking away from the spot, when a peculiar voice behind him arrested his footsteps.
“Hello, you! Jest draw rein a minute, ef you please.”
Instinctively guessing that he was the one accosted, McCabe stopped to see who the presumptuous person was. A tall, angular specimen of humanity, with long, dangling legs and ungainly feet, was coming toward him with awkward strides. He was an utter stranger to McCabe, but the latter saw at a glance that he was a Yankee, of the raw sort, evidently just from his native State. His dress alone would have proven that fact, to say nothing of the nasal twang in his voice, and the “down-east” peculiarity of speech. He wore a tall, white hat, the nap of which stuck straight out; a pair of striped trowsers, which clung tenaciously to the awkward members they protected; and a blue, threadbare coat, whose swallow-tails reached nearly to his heels.
“How d’ye dew, stranger?” drawled the specimen, as he came up. “Right nice weather we’re havin’ nowadays, ain’t it?”