I.
He came up the mountain road at nightfall, urging his lean mustang forward wearily, and coughing now and then—a heavy, hollow cough that told its own story.
There were only two houses on the mesa stretching shaggy and sombre with greasewood from the base of the mountains to the valley below,—two unpainted redwood dwellings, with their clumps of trailing pepper-trees and tattered bananas,—mere specks of civilization against a stern background of mountain-side. The traveler halted before one of them, bowing awkwardly as the master of the house came out.
"Mr. Brandt, I reckon."
Joel Brandt looked up into the stranger's face. Not a bad face, certainly: sallow and drawn with suffering,—one of those hopelessly pathetic faces, barely saved from the grotesque by a pair of dull, wistful eyes. Not that Joel Brandt saw anything either grotesque or pathetic about the man.
"Another sickly looking stranger outside, Barbara, wants to try the air up here. Can you keep him? Or maybe the Fox's'll give him a berth."
Mrs. Brandt shook her head in a house-wifely meditation.
"No; Mrs. Fox can't, that's certain. She has an asthma and two bronchitises there now. What's the matter with him, Joel?"
The stranger's harsh, resonant cough answered.
"Keep him?—to be sure. You might know I'd keep him, Joel; the night air's no place for a man to cough like that. Bring him into the kitchen right away."