The road between Harlow and Bean’s Mill was all that hoof and heart could wish, and the long-gaited three-year-old was sound in wind and limb and as fresh as the frosty morning. It was still early in the day when the deputy-sheriff drew rein in front of Luke Watt’s store. He jumped out and hitched the strawberry mare to a well-chewed post and threw a blanket and a goat-skin robe over her. Then he cleared the frost from his eye-lashes, pulled his fur mittens off and threw them into the pung and rubbed his bare hands briskly together as if to limber up the fingers. Then he sank his hands deep into the roomy side-pockets of his fur coat.
“You keep your collar turned up an’ your cap pulled down and sit right there till you get the high sign,” he said to Young Dan.
Young Dan nodded his muffled head. He sat stuffily in the pung, very bulky and shapeless in an old coonskin coat of the deputy-sheriff’s, looking as much like “The World’s Fattest Lady” as anything else in the world—much more like that than like a lanky young trapper of fur.
As Archie Wallace pushed open the door of the store he closed his eyes tight, the quicker to readjust them to the gloom within from the brightness without. As he closed the door behind him with his left elbow—for still his right hand was in his pocket—he opened his eyes and looked at everything in one wide-eyed glance. He saw, in that first comprehensive look, everything in the store—the counter, the fancy groceries on the dirty shelves, the barrels and crates, the baskets of eggs, the chewing-gum and depressing cigars in the little show-case, the boots and suspenders and amazing neckties hanging aloft, and Mrs. Watt and three customers—everything which he had expected to see except Luke Watt. He made his way to the counter and Mrs. Watt and wished her a rather grim good-morning. His professional manner was always uppermost when he was actually engaged in the final stages of a piece of professional work. He felt that he owed this alike to the Law and to the probable offenders against the Law.
“I want to speak to your husband, Luke Watt,” he continued.
Mrs. Watt, who was as like Mr. Watt in appearance and character as a woman could be, changed color swiftly and at the same time met the man’s grim gaze with a hard and brazen glint in her eyes.
“You sure ain’t forgot my husband’s name, Archie Wallace,” she said. “What are you puttin’ on yer depity-sheriff airs for this mornin’? You sound like you was huntin’ for trouble.”
“You’ve said it,” returned Mr. Wallace, drily. “Where is Luke?”
“At home in bed, sick with a cold; an’ that’s where he has been since yesterday afternoon,” she answered. “You can go over to the house an’ make a call on him in bed, if yer business is that pressin’”; and then, with a swift change from effrontery to curiosity in eyes and voice, she leaned across the counter and whispered, “What’s the trouble?”
“Exactly what you suspect, Mrs. Watt—an’ maybe quite a lot more,” he replied, whispering in his turn from the force of example rather than by intention. “Now I’ll just step over to the house an’ have a talk with him.”