Gordon Makimmon started forward with a rasping oath, but, before he could reach the ground, General Jackson had propelled himself to the fringe of humanity. He made a last, convulsive effort to rise, his jaws snapped.... A short, iron bar descended upon his head.
Gordon’s face became instantly, irrevocably, the shrunken face of an old man.
The clustered men with the dead, mangled body of the dog before them; the serene, sliding stream beyond; the towering east range bathed in keen sunlight, blurred, mingled, in his vision. He put out a hand against one of the porch supports—a faded shape of final and irremediable sorrow.
He exhibited neither the courage of resistance nor the superiority of contempt; he offered, apparently, nothing material whatsoever to satisfy the vengeance of a populace cunningly defrauded of their just opportunities and profits; he seemed to be no more colored with life, no more instinct with sap, than the crackling leaves blown by the increasing wind about the uneasy feet on the grass.
He lipped a short, unintelligible period, gazing intent and troubled at the throng. He shivered perceptibly: under the hard blue sky the wind swept with the sting of an icy knout. Then, turning his obscure, infinitely dejected back upon the silent menace of the bitter, sallow countenances, the harsh angular forms, of Greenstream, he walked slowly to the door. He paused, his hand upon the knob, as if arrested by a memory, a realization. The door opened; the house absorbed him, presented unbroken its weather-worn face.
A deep, concerted sigh escaped from the men without, as though, with the vanishing of that bowed and shabby frame, they had seen vanish their last chance for reprisal, for hope.
XIX
The cold sharpened; the sky, toward evening, glittered like an emerald; the earth was black, it resembled a ball of iron spinning in the diffused green radiance of a dayless and glacial void. The stream before the Makimmon dwelling moved without a sound under banked ledges of ice.