Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/262

 He had hired a livery rig in Cappsville—a buggy that was decrepit and stiff in the springs, and a horse that was shaggy with its winter coat and as slow as rheumatism. The six miles of hill roads had been washed down to bed-rock by the April rains, and the drive would have been a long boredom of jolted discomfort to the Honorable Ben if it had been anything at all to him. As a matter of fact it was nothing. It did not register on him. Although it was a road that should have been full of memories of his youth, he drove it blindly, his eyes focused on empty space over the horse's ears, the reins slack in his hands, his collar turned up, his hat pulled down, leaning forward in his seat, his mind occupied. His unbuttoned overcoat showed that he was wearing broadcloth and clean linen, as became a man of his position in life. Under the brim of his hat his eyes were a cold blue, pinched in wrinkles.

It should have been one of the romantic moments of his life. Here he was—the most successful man that the neighborhood had ever produced—coming back, for the first time in twenty years, to revisit the scenes of his early hardships. And it would have been romantic to him if it had not been that he was thinking of his future, not of his past. And that was characteristic of the Honorable Ben. He was "a go-ahead man," his admirers said. His critics put it that he was "always on the make." His victims expressed another view of the same