Page:Frederick Faust--Free Range Lanning.djvu/204

200 long fast and the hard ride which had preceded this meal, and stared at the fire.

Rather, the fire was the thing which he kept chiefly in the center of his vision, but his glances went everywhere, to all sides, up, and down. Hal Dozier had hunted him hotly down the valley of the Little Silver River, but near the village of Los Toros the fagged posse and Hal himself had dropped back and once more given up the chase. No doubt they would rest for a few hours in the town, change horses, and then come after him again.

It was a new Andrew Lanning that sat there by the fire. He had left Martindale a clear-faced boy; the months that followed had changed him to a man; the boyhood had been literally burned out of him. The skin of his face, indeed, refused to tan, but now, instead of a healthy and crisp white it was a colorless sallow. The rounded cheeks were now straight and sank in sharply beneath his cheek bones, with a sharply incised line beside the mouth. And his expression at all times was one of quivering alertness—the mouth a little compressed and straight, the nostrils seeming a trifle distended, and the eyes as restless as the eyes of a hungry wolf. The old blank, dull look was gone from them; the uneasy glitter which had come into them when he fled from Martindale on that age-long day had never died from them since. Sometimes, when his glance steadied on one object, the light became a point, but usually it was a continual shifting. Take a candle and pass it from side to side before the eyes of a man, and the same gleam will come into them which was never out of the eyes of Andrew Lanning. Two things might have been said about that expression of his eyes: that it was the glimmer of danger or the light of fear that turns into danger.