Margaret passed in at the door in order to cough unheard, that nothing might be added to the tale of Mrs. Jakes' delinquencies.
CHAPTER IX
"And what have we here?" said the stranger loudly. "What have we here, now?"
Paul, sitting cross-legged in his old place under the wall of the dam, with a piece of clay between his fingers, looked round with a start. The stranger had come up behind him, treading unheard in his burst and broken shoes upon the soft dust, and now stood leaning upon a stick and smiling down upon him with a kind of desperate jauntiness. His attitude and manner, with their parody of urbane ease, had for the moment power to hide the miserable shabbiness of his clothes, which were not so much broken and worn as decayed; it was decay rather than hardship which marked the whole figure of the man. Only the face, clean-shaven save for a new crop of bristles, had some quality of mobility and temper, and the eyes with which he looked at Paul were wary and hard.
"Oh, nothing," said Paul, uneasily, covering his clay with one hand. "Who are you?"
The stranger eyed him for some moments longer with the shrewdness of one accustomed to read his fortune in other men's faces, and while he did so the smile remained fixed on his own as though he had forgotten to take it off.
"Who am I!" he exclaimed. "My boy, it 'd take a long time to tell you. But there 's one thing that perhaps you can see for yourself—I 'm a gentleman."
Paul considered this information deliberately.
"Are you?" he said.
"I 'm dusty," admitted the other; "dusty both inside and out. And I 'm travelin' on foot—without luggage. So much I admit; I 've met with misfortunes. But there 's one thing the devil himself can't take away from me, and that 's the grand old name of gentleman. An' now, my lad, to business; you live at that farm there?"