The dog, too, had arrived there ahead of its master and was fawning now on the girl, who leaned impulsively over to take the gentle-pointed muzzle between her palms.
“I’m sorry I whopped ye,” she declared in a silver-voiced contrition that made the man think of thrush notes. “Hit wasn’t yore fault no-how. Hit was thet—thet stuck-up furriner. I hates him!”
The setter waved its plumed tail in forgiveness and contentment, and the girl, discovering with an upward glance that she had been overheard, rose and stood for a moment defiantly facing the object of her denunciation, then, as embarrassment flooded her cheeks with color, fled into the house.
The sense of having stepped back into an older century had been growing on John Spurrier ever since he had turned away from the town of Waterfall, and now it possessed him with a singular fascination.
Here was a different world, somber under its shadow of frugality, and breathing out the heavy atmosphere of isolation. The spirit of this strange life looked out from the wearied eyes of Dyke Cappeze as he sat filling his pipe across the hearth, a little later, and it sounded in his voice when he announced slowly:
“It’s not for me to withhold hospitality in a land where a ready welcome is about all we have to offer, and yet you could hardly have picked a worse house to come to between the Virginia border and the Kaintuck ridges.”
Spurrier raised his brows interrogatively, and at the same moment he noticed matters hitherto overlooked. The windows were heavily shuttered and his host sat beyond the line of vision from the open door—with a rifle leaning an arm’s length away.
“Coming as a stranger,” continued Cappeze, “you start without enmities—with a clean page. You might spend your life here and find a sincere welcome everywhere—so long as you avoided other men’s controversies. But you come to me and that, sir, is a bad beginning—a very bad beginning.”
A contemplative cloud of smoke went up from the pipe, and the voice finished in a tone of bitterness.