Page:RidersOfSilences - Max Brand.djvu/136

130 gone down the hill and into the house. In the largest habitable room they found a fire fed with rotten timbers from the wrecked portion of the building, and scattered through the room a sullen and dejected group: Mansie, Branch, Jim Boone, and Black Morgan Gandil.

At a glance it was easy to detect their malady; it was the horrible ennui which comes to men who are always surrounded by one set of faces. If a man is happily married he may bear with his wife and his children constantly through long stretches of time, but the glamour of life lies in the varying personalities which a man glimpses in passing, but never knows.

This was a rare crew. Every man of them was marked for courage and stamina and wild daring. Yet even so in their passive moments they hated each other with a hate that passed the understanding of common men.

Through seven years they had held together, through fair weather and foul, and now each knew from the other's expression the words that were about to be spoken, and each knew that the other was reading him, and loathing what he read.

So they were apt to relapse into long silences unless Jack was with them, for being a woman her variety was infinite, or Pierre le Rouge, whom all except Black Gandil loved and petted, and feared.

They were a battered crowd. Wind and hard weather and a thousand suns had marked them, and the hand of man had branded them. Here and there was a touch of gray in their hair, and about the