Some one bawled at him from the ground below. Lane did not start, though that was the first human voice he had heard in two months.
The young man who stood there, and who had come across the gray ledges from the edge of the timber growth, carried an arm in a sling.
“Do you ever look at anybody if they’re nearer than ten miles away?” inquired the visitor, with the teasing irony that it seemed popular in the Umcolcus region to employ with “Ladder” Lane.
When the old man stood up the fitness of his sobriquet was apparent. He unfolded himself, joint by joint, like a carpenter’s rule, and stood gaunt as a bean pole and well towards seven feet in height.
The name painted on the door of the photograph “saloon” that even now lies rotting on the banks of Ragmuff in Castonia settlement is: “Linus Lane. Tintypes and Views.” No one in Castonia ever knew whither he had come. Oxen or horses and a teamster hired for each trip had dragged the rumbling van from settlement to settlement at the edge of the woods, and finally to Castonia, where it arrived hobbling on three wheels, one corner supported by a dragging sapling. Lane strode ahead, swearing over his shoulder at the driver, and his ill-temper did not seem to leave him even when he had opened his door for business. It is remembered that his first customer was old Bailey, who was corresponding with an unknown woman down-country, and who came for a tintype with hair and whiskers colored to the hue of the raven’s wing, evidently desiring to make an impression on his correspondent. And when old Bailey, shocked and disappointed at the painful verity of the tintype, had muttered that it didn’t seem to be a very pretty picture, Lane, who was doubled like a jack-knife under the saloon’s low roof, had yelled at him:
“Pretty picture! You come to me with a face like a scrambled egg dropped into a bucket of soot and complain because you don’t get a pretty picture! Get out of here!”
And he stopped slicing up the sheet of tintypes, slammed it on the floor, drove out old Bailey, nailed up the door of the saloon, and started for the big woods with his few possessions on his back.
To those who remonstrated on behalf of the offended old Bailey, Lane said he had been feeling like that for some time, and was taking to the woods before he expressed his disgust by killing some one.
Therefore, the job on the top of Jerusalem that fell to him quite naturally, after his many years’ sojourn as a recluse at its foot, was a job that fitted admirably with his scheme of life.
“And it looks up there like it must have looked when Noah said, ‘All ashore that’s goin’ ashore,’ on Mount Ariat, or wherever ’twas he throwed anchor,” announced Tommy Eye, of Britt’s crew, returning once from a Sunday trip to the fire station.