Bartamon was a small man, with a skull-like head, to the hollows of which, the bony projections, dark skin clung dryly; his eyes were mere dimming glints of watery consciousness; and from the sleeves of a faded blue shirt, the folds of formless, canvas trousers, knotted, blackish hands, grotesque feet, appeared to hang jerking on wires.
“Where’s the Father?” Gordon inquired.
The other rested from the laborious sawing of a log, blinking and tremulous in the hard brilliancy of midday. “Beyond,” he answered vaguely, waving up the valley; “Sim Caley’s wife sent for him from Hollidew’s farm. Sim or his wife think they’re going to die two or three times the year, and bother the Father.... But I wouldn’t wonder they would, and them working for Hollidew, dawn, day and dark, with never a proper skinful of food, only this and that, maybe, chick’ry and fat pork and moldy ends of nothing.”
He filled the blackened ruin of a pipe, shaking in his palsied fingers, clasped it in mumbling, toothless gums: he was so sere, so juiceless, that the smoke trailing from his sunken lips might well have been the spontaneous conflagration of his desiccated interior.
“Hollidew’s a terrible man for money,” he continued, “it hurts him like a cut with a hick’ry to see a dollar go. They say he won’t hear tell of quitting his fortune for purgatory, no, nor for heaven neither. He can’t get him to make a will, the lawyer can’t. He was telling the Father the other day, sitting right in the house there, ‘Pompey Hollidew,’ he says, ‘won’t even talk will....’ He’d like to take it all with him to the devil, Pompey would.” He turned with a sigh to the log. A cross-cut saw, with a handle at either end, lay upon the ground; and Gordon, grasping the far handle, helped him to drag the slim, glittering steel through the powdering fiber of the wood.
As he worked mechanically Gordon’s thoughts returned to the past, the past which had collapsed so utterly, so disastrously, so swiftly upon his complacency, robbing him of his sustenance, of Clare, of his home. The complaining voice of the old man finally pierced his abstraction. “If you are going to ride,” Bartamon complained, “don’t drag your feet.”
The two men consumed a formless, ample meal, after which Gordon still waited negligently for the priest. The sun sank toward the western range; the late afternoon grew as hushed, as rich in color, in vert shadows, ultramarine, and amber, as heavy in foliage bathed in aureate light, as the nave of a cathedral under stained glass.
In a corner of the shed Gordon found a fishing rod of split bamboo, sprung with time and neglect, the wrappings hanging and effectually loose. A small brass reel was fastened to the butt, holding an amount of line. He balanced the rod in his grasp, discovering it to be the property of the old man.
“What’ll you take for it?” he demanded. His store of money had been reduced to a precarious sum of silver; but the longing had seized him to fish in the open, to follow a stream into the tranquil dusk.
“I got some flies too.” The other resurrected a cigar box, which held some feathered hooks attached to doubtful guts. “They are dried out,” Gordon pronounced, testing them; “what will you take for the whole worthless lot?” Bartamon demurred: the rod had been a good rod, it had been given to him in the past by a mayor, or had it been a senator? It was not like common rods, made of six strips of bamboo, but of eight, the line was silk.... He would take sixty cents.