The conversation was interrupted by the little girl.
“There comes the preacher,” she said.
The woman turned and looked down the road in the direction from which she had just come.
CHAPTER V
A MAN driving a country buggy was approaching. He was a tall, spare man, in a suit of black ready-made clothes that seemed not to fit him in any place, and to be a cheap imitation of a clergyman's frock suit. He wore cotton gloves. At his feet was a shiny handbag made of some inexpensive material to imitate alligator skin. His hair and his heavy, drooping mustache were black. His face was narrow, the cheek bones high, the mouth straight. One of the man's eyes was partly grown over with a cataract, and his effort to see equally with that eye gave him a curious, squinting expression. He pulled up on the roadside, got out, tied his horse to a fence rail with one of the lines, took out his handbag, and came over to the little group waiting by the bars.
“Good evening, brethren,” he said. “The doctor told me that Nicholas Parks had been called to his account, so I came up to give him Christian burial.”
“He died sudden, I guess,” replied one of the men.
“It's God's way,” said the preacher. “The sinner is taken in the twinkling of an eye.”