Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/263

 quality when they accused him of having no conscience.

He drove steadily, indifferently, up hill and down, past the wood-lots, the rocky meadows, the shabby farm-houses, the weather-beaten barns. The spring had come late, and, though a May sunlight was fitfully warm on the road, a March wind was boisterous in the upper branches of the wayside trees and came plunging across the woods like the sound of surf. He ignored it.

He showed no interest in anything until he came to the Divins woods and saw ahead of him, on a cleared hillside, the Divins homestead. The reins tightened mechanically in his hands. The horse stopped.

Down the path from the farm-house to the road there was approaching a tall, gaunt man who walked like a moving frame of bones, lifelessly. He was dressed in clothes that had been worn and washed and sun-faded down to the essence and common nature of all cloth—an old felt hat the color of mildew, a brown cotton shirt, stained trousers, and dried cowhide boots. The house from which he came was an unpainted frame wreck that had been bleached and rotted by the inclement mountain seasons until it looked as broken and dejected as the man himself. He had an alder pole in one hand and a rusty tin can in the other.

The Honorable Ben studied him. He studied the house. Remembering it as he had known it in