Thus, till the assassin is out of sight.
Then she totters back to the side of her sister, to tell in trembling accents, how she, too, had been frayed by a spectre in the street!
Chapter Thirty Two.
The “Choctaw Chief.”
“You’ll excuse me, stranger, for interruptin’ you in the readin’ o’ your newspaper. I like to see men in the way o’ acquirin’ knowledge. But we’re all of us here goin’ to licker up. Won’t you join?”
The invitation, brusquely, if not uncourteously, extended, comes from a man of middle age, in height at least six feet three, without reckoning the thick soles of his bull-skin boots—the tops of which rise several inches above the knee. A personage, rawboned, and of rough exterior, wearing a red blanket-coat; his trousers tucked into the aforesaid boots; with a leather belt buckled around his waist, under the coat, but over the haft of a bowie-knife, alongside which peeps out the butt of a Colt’s revolving pistol. In correspondence with his clothing and equipment, he shows a cut-throat countenance, typical of the State Penitentiary; cheeks bloated as from excessive indulgence in drink; eyes watery and somewhat bloodshot; lips thick and sensual; with a nose set obliquely, looking as if it had received hard treatment in some pugilistic encounter. His hair is of a yellowish clay colour, lighter in tint upon the eyebrows. There is none either on his lips or jaws, nor yet upon his thick hog-like throat; which looks as if some day it may need something stiffer than a beard to protect it from the hemp of the hangman.
He, to whom the invitation has been extended, is of quite a different appearance. In age a little over half that of the individual who has addressed him; complexion dark and cadaverous; the cheeks hollow and haggard, as from sleepless anxiety; the upper lip showing two elongated bluish blotches—the stub of moustaches recently removed; the eyes coal black, with sinister glances sent in suspicious furtiveness from under a broad hat-brim pulled low down over the brow; the figure fairly shaped, but with garments coarse and clumsily fitting, too ample both for body and limbs, as if intended to conceal rather than show them to advantage.
A practised detective, after scanning this individual, taking note of his habiliments, with the hat and his manner of wearing it, would pronounce him a person dressed in disguise—this, for some good reason, adopted. A suspicion of the kind appears to be in the mind of the rough Hercules, who has invited him to “licker up;” though he is no detective.