"My name is Brown—Horatio Brown, very much at your service," answered the other, with a manner like that of a successful, yet obsequious commercial traveller.
It was on Ordway's tongue to retort: "You lie—it's Gus Wherry!"—but checking the impulse with a frown, he turned on his heel and asked the two men for whom he was looking to come with him to settle their disagreement in Baxter's office. As he moved down the building an instant later, it was with an effort that he kept his gaze fixed straight ahead through the archway, for he was aware that every muscle in his body pricked him to turn back and follow Wherry to the end. That the man would be forced, in self-defence, to keep his secret for a time at least, he had caught in the smiling insolence of his glance; but that it was possible to enter into a permanent association or even a treaty with Gus Wherry, he knew to be a supposition that was utterly beyond the question. The crime for which the man had been sentenced he could not remember; but he had a vague recollection that something morbidly romantic in his history had combined with his handsome face to give him an ephemeral notoriety as the Adonis of imaginative shop-girls. Even in prison Wherry had attained a certain prominence because of his beauty, which at the time when Ordway first saw him had been conspicuous in spite of his convict's clothes. In the years since then his athletic figure had grown a trifle too heavy, and his fair hair had worn a little thin on the crown of his head; yet these slight changes of time had left him, Ordway admitted reluctantly, still handsome in the brawny, full-blooded style, which had generally made fools of women. His lips were still as red, his features as severely classic, and his manner was not less vulgar, and quite as debonnair as in the days when the newspapers had clamoured for his pictures. Even the soft, girlish cleft in his smooth-shaven chin, Ordway remembered now, with a return of the instinctive aversion with which it had first inspired him. Yet he was obliged to confess, as he walked ahead of Catesby and Frazier down the dusty floor of the warehouse, that if Wherry had been less of an uncompromising rascal, he would probably have made a particularly amiable acquaintance.
CHAPTER II
Ordway Compromises With The Past
WHEN Ordway came out of Baxter's office, he found that Gus Wherry had left the warehouse, but the effect upon him of the man's appearance in Tappahannock was not to be overcome by the temporary withdrawal of his visible presence. Not only the town, but existence itself seemed altered, and in a way polluted, by the obtrusion of Wherry's personality upon the scene. Though he was not in the building, Ordway felt an angry conviction that he was in the air. It was impossible to breathe freely lest he might by accident draw in some insidious poison which would bring him under the influence of his past life and of Gus Wherry.
As he went along the street at one o'clock to his dinner at Mrs. Twine's, he was grateful for the intensity of the sun, which rendered him, while he walked in it, almost incapable of thought. There was positive relief in the fact that he must count the uneven lengths of board walk which it was necessary for him to traverse, and the buzzing of the blue flies before his face forced his attention, at the minute, from the inward to the outward disturbance.
When he reached the house, Mrs. Twine met him at the door and led him, with an inquiry as to his susceptibility to sunstroke, into the awful gloom of her tightly shuttered parlour.
"I declar' you do look well nigh in yo' last gasp," she remarked cheerfully, bustling into the dining-room for a palm leaf fan. "Thar, now, come right in an' set down an' eat yo' dinner. Hot or cold, glad or sorry, I never saw the man yit that could stand goin' without his dinner at the regular hour. Sech is the habit in some folks that I remember when old Mat Fawling's second wife died he actually hurried up her funeral an hour earlier so as to git back in time for dinner. 'It ain't that I'm meanin' any disrespect to Sary, Mrs. Twine,' he said to me right whar I was layin' her out, 'but the truth is that I can't even mourn on an empty stomach. The undertaker put it at twelve,' he said, 'but I reckon we might manage to git out to the cemetery by eleven.'"
"All the same if you'll give me a slice of bread and a glass of milk, I'll take it standing," remarked Ordway. "I'm sorry to leave you, Mrs. Twine, even for a few months," he added, "but I think I'll try to get board outside the town until the summer is over."
"Well, I'll hate to lose you, suh, to be sure," responded Mrs. Twine, dealing out the fried batter with a lavish hand despite his protest, "for I respect you as a fellow mortal, though I despise you as a sex."
Her hard eyes softened as she looked at him; but his gaze was on the walnut coloured oilcloth, where the flies dispersed lazily before the waving elm branch in the hands of the small Negro, and so he did not observe the motherly tenderness which almost beautified her shrewish face.