“Thanks, very kind of you. Oh, I’m all right now.” Dominick pressed the hand in return and then, bending a little forward, sent a glance of imploring query round the stranger’s shoulder at Rose.
She caught the eye, read its behest, and presented the new-comer:
“Mr. Ryan, this is Mr. Buford who is snowed in here with us. Mr. Buford came here the same day as you, only he came on the Murphysville stage.”
Buford sat down between them on one of the horsehair chairs that were sociably arranged round the table. The firelight threw into prominence the bony angles of his thin face and glazed the backward sweep of his hair, dark-brown, and worn combed away from his forehead, where a pair of heavy, flexible eyebrows moved up and down like an animated commentary on the conversation. When anything surprising was said they went up, anything puzzling or painful they were drawn down. He rested one hand on his knee, the fingers turned in, and, sitting bolt upright, buttoned tight into his worn frock-coat, turned a glance of somewhat deprecating amiability upon the invalid.
“You had a pretty close call, a-pretty-close-call,” he said. “If the operator at Rocky Bar hadn’t had the sense to wire up here, that would have been the end of your life story.”
Dominick had heard this from every member of the snowed-in party. Repetition was not making it any more agreeable, and there was an effect of abrupt ungraciousness in his short answer which was merely a word of comment.
“Didn’t the people at the Rocky Bar Hotel try to dissuade you from starting?” said Buford. “They must have known it was dangerous. They must have been worried about you or they wouldn’t have telegraphed up.”
“Oh, I believe they did.” The young man tried to hide the annoyance the questions gave him under a dry brevity of speech. “They did all that they ought to have done. I’ll see them again on my way down.”
“And yet you persisted!” The actor turned to Rose with whom, as he sat beside her at table, he had become quite friendly. “The blind confidence of youth, Miss Cannon, isn’t it a grand, inspiring thing?”
Dominick shifted his aching feet under the rug. He was becoming exceedingly irritated and impatient, and wondered how much longer he would be able to respond politely to the conversational assiduities of the stranger.