Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/129

ll7 Meanwhile her father, after stopping by the way in a saloon, returned to the flat in which he and Milly had spent the winter, and sat down beside a front-room window, in his shirt-sleeves, to smoke. It was the typical room of a circus man's leisure, decorated with old photographs of acrobatic troupes and high-wire "artists" and famous equestriennes who smiled out of yellowing prints as if they had thought their long-forgotten charms would bloom there immortally. A riding whip, which his wife had used, was crossed with a horseshoe under a staring crayon portrait of her wearing her "waterfall" in a chenille net. A tarnished gilt frame held the indenture of his apprenticeship, made when he was six years old, to a "teacher of dancing, gymnastics, and theatrical horsemanship." The man used to lash him with a "lunge" whip, holding him with a line about the waist; and Yost remembered that training when he was considering how best to discipline his daughter. His past was thick about him—and he smoked, indifferent to it all, callous with age, and sleepy. His gray eyebrows were tilted up from the bridge of his nose in a harmless scowl; his gray mustache, professionally waxed, bristled above a mouth that drooped weakly at one corner where the pipe weighed it down.

He was not troubled about Milly. He was accustomed to think of her—as the old person so often thinks of the young one—not as a human being with attributes and character, but rather as a new example of the known faults and flightiness's of youth.