Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/72

60 of those deft mechanical idiots who are never happy except when they are tinkering with machinery, who invent reasons for tinkering and then tinker so badly that they have to tinker again to cure the ill effects of the previous tinkering, and so on forever. It was an annoying defect in the man's character, but Ruttley accepted it—as he accepted all human delinquencies—without trying to correct it. He was not a reformer. He was a playwright.

He did not so much as look to see which part of the machine was to be operated on, but turned his back and moved slowly away up the road, in his dust-ulster, smoking. The apple orchard was not like any he had ever seen on the stage, and he regarded it a moment. The blue haze of the hills beyond was a commonplace of back-drops, and he turned from it to the other side of the road, where poison-ivy and blackberry brambles struggled with a thicket of plum shoots for possession of a hollow in the hillside. When he passed the thicket he saw a house, a well-top, and a woman drawing water there.

That was the order in which he saw them, and the order in which he considered them. The house might have had some interest, for a "By Gosh" drama, if it had not been spoiled by a new roof of cedar shingles, new tin gutters, and new leader pipes. The well-top was characteristic—particularly the faded green verditer of the lattice on it. The young woman had her back to him; and he saw, at once, that it was a back that was all a back should be.