She indicated the two men who, standing by the hall stove, were divesting themselves of their wraps. One of them was a tall upright old man with a sweep of grizzled beard covering his chest, and gray hair falling from the dome of a bald head.
The other was much younger, tall also, and spare to leanness. He wore a gray fedora hat, and against its chill, unbecoming tint, his face, its prominent, bony surfaces nipped by the cold to a raw redness, looked sallow and unhealthy. With an air of solicitude he laid his overcoat across a chair, brushing off the snow with a careful hand. Buttoned tight in a black cutaway with the collar turned up about his neck, he had an appearance of being uncomfortably compressed into garments too small for him. His shiny-knuckled, purplish hands, pinching up the shoulders of his coat over the chair-back, were in keeping with his general suggestion of a large-boned meagerly-covered lankness. The fact that he was smooth-shaven, combined with the unusual length of dark hair that appeared below his hat-brim, lent him a suggestion of something interestingly unconventional, almost artistic. In the region where he now found himself he would have been variously set down as a gambler, a traveling clergyman, an actor, or perhaps only a vender of patent medicines who had some odd, attractive way of advertising himself, such as drawing teeth with an electric appliance, or playing the guitar from the tail-board of his showman’s cart.
Now, having arranged his coat to its best advantage, he turned to Perley and said with a curiously deep and resonant voice,
“And, mine host, a stove in my bedroom, a stove in my bedroom or I perish.”
Cora giggled and threw across the hall to Miss Cannon a delighted murmur of,
“Oh, say, ain’t he just the richest thing?”
“You’ve got us trapped and caged here for a spell, I guess,” said the older man. “Any one else in the same box?”
“Oh, you’ll not want for company,” said Perley, pride at the importance of the announcement vibrating in his tone. “We’ve got Willoughby here from the Bella K. with his four setter dogs, and Bill Cannon and his daughter up from the coast.”
“Bill Cannon!”—the two men stared and the younger one said,
“Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King from San Francisco?”