She certainly was a lovely girl! In the early morning light her light brown hair seemed threaded all through the mass of it with strands of gold. Her eyes were the blue of a mountain lake—but with ice in their depths. Their gaze, as it was turned on Hunt, was utterly impersonal.
Her peachy complexion as well, offset by dark brows and red lips, aroused Hunt’s admiration for its sheer beauty. Brown-gold hair, blue eyes, petite and lissome figure—when had such description of a girl caught in the cogs of his memory? Somewhere lately he had seen, or heard described, such a sprite of a girl as this.
She was dressed plainly enough in serviceable corduroy—short skirt, blouse, broad-brimmed hat, high laced boots. A crimson scarf was knotted under the collar of her blouse. She wore no ornament.
Nell did not say much during that brief walk. Not that she was at all timid or bashful; but she seemed to feel no particular interest in this young man who had put himself out to help Sam Tubbs.
For her own part she considered Sam a nuisance. She had no use for the old reprobate. It was solely for Mother Tubbs’ sake that she had bothered herself with regard to Sam. Finding him drunk—as usual—on her way home from Colorado Brown’s place early on this Sunday morning, she had tried to get him home without realizing at first that Sam was quite so far gone in liquor as he was.
As for this man who walked by her side, carrying so easily the insensible Sam, Nell did not question who he was. That he was a stranger—possibly a traveling salesman, or “drummer”—perhaps a mining man, she believed, if she thought of him at all. As Hunt suspected, she did not for a moment identify him as the parson Joe Hurley had brought to Canyon Pass. In any event she could not have imagined the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt as this sort of person.
They turned abruptly into another narrow alley and came to the front of the Tubbs’ shack. The yard, fenced by pickets of barrel-staves, was neatly kept and there was an attempt at a flower bed on either side of the walk. Mother Tubbs usually punished Sam for his sin of drunkenness, after he had slept off his potations, by making him weed the tiny gardens and rake the path. These penitential activities kept the Tubbs premises spick and span.
Nell led the way imperturbably around to the back door of the shack. This door was open and a thin blue haze—odorous and appetizing—floated out of the kitchen.
“Just getting a nice breakfast for you, honey,” said Mother Tubbs, filling the doorway and seeing Nell first of all. “Now, if only Sam would come along—Is that Sam? He ain’t dead, is he?”
“Only dead drunk,” said Nell in scorn.