Page:Frederick Faust--Free Range Lanning.djvu/46



HE house would have been more in place on the main street of a town than here in the mountain desert; but when the first John Merchant had made his stake and could build his home as it pleased him to build, his imagination harked back to a mid-Victorian model, built of wood, with high, pointed roofs, many carved balconies and windows, and several towers. These houses habitually seem in need of new paint, and, looking on them, one pities the men and women who have lived and died there. Such was the house which the first John Merchant built, a grotesque castle of wood. And here the second John Merchant lived with his son Charles, whose taste had quite outgrown the house.

But to the uneducated eye of Andrew Lanning it was a great and dignified building, something of which the whole countryside was proud. They would point it out to strangers: "There's the Merchant house. Can you raise that in your home town?"

The way led for a short distance through a grove of trees; then, rounding an elbow turn, revealed the full view of the house. Andrew reined the pinto under the trees to look up at that tall, black mass. It was doubly dark against the sky, for now the first streaks of gray light were pale along the eastern horizon, and the house seemed to tower up into the center of the heavens. Andy sighed at the thought of stealing through the great halls