Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/86

68 porcelain, they had a ridiculous resemblance to a children's picnic. And they seemed to feel it, to be held in amaze at the way the situation had been changed. They had come prepared to bluster, to demand music from the fiddle, to dance, to play boisterous tricks, and here they were, subdued by a Circe who fed them doughnuts. But they ate them, they broke bread in the house, they unconsciously assimilated the canons of such hospitality—and they eagerly devoured the cookies. Hollister shuffled a little in his chair, trying for some phrase that should show him master of the affair but he could not shake off an undefinable uneasiness. Neither Sheridan nor Jackson had noticed him by word but both sat, evidently welcome guests, and there was a quiet menace in the way they had shifted their guns so that they lay on their thighs while they munched at their doughnuts, a menace repeated in the cold gleam in their eyes. Hollister had never forgotten the demonstration of Sheridan's shooting. He saw both men were packing an extra gun. He remembered Jackson's boast of left-handedness. He had a premonition that he could not start anything that would not finish suddenly and disastrously to himself, first of all. And he had lost his grip over the men who had galloped so recklessly across the meadows on their "chivaree." There would be another laugh on him, and there had been too many laughs of late. He was a bully and his leadership had to be asserted by a bully's methods. The men had no keen liking for him, he was well aware of that.