“That’s young Buckman gone to Liddleshorn for Egbert. I told him to saddle the black mare.”
She only looked and looked. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, her lips were steady. She looked from the handsome dead face to the shabby, drenched clothes, which were splintered all over with little spear-shaped fragments of ice.
They were the clothes of a tramp. His boots were burst, a dirty handkerchief was knotted round his long throat, and on his chin was an unkempt beard—a piebald beard, half black, half gray. He was handsome still, but it was the wreck of comeliness—the sodden face of a dissolute man of fifty.
“He must have had ill luck lately,” Jethro said. “He was evidently coming back to us.”
“If he had come back—alive,” she said thoughtfully, “I wonder——”
Her steady gaze on the dead, aged, handsome face never wavered. If he had come back to Folly Corner alive—so—would he have possessed the old magic?
His eyes were fathoming the raftered roof. In every corner, clothed in the swaying black cobwebs, was an imp—the evil spirits who had swayed his life.
“We shall never know what brought him to this. Come away, dear,” urged Jethro.
She shook Jethro’s big hand off with petulance. The water from the dead man’s clothes was freezing at her feet, beneath her slippers, and chilled her. That was the nearest approach to contact she reached with the dead. She made no attempt to touch him, to go a little nearer, to stoop and stare into the glazing, fearful surface of his wide dark eyes.