Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/13



HERE was a good deal of loose skin on Charley Thomson's neck, dry wrinkled skin, which caused one to wonder how he stretched it to shave. That he managed it someway, day by day, was as evident as the hills around Saunders, for never a hair had grown long enough to interfere with his mouth in all his years in the town.

A great avid mouth, like a cannibal fish, elongated by wrinkles at the corners, which bent it downwards with a sneering cast; a clubbed, fleshy nose, purple, immense; small eyes, squinting from a life-long habit of drawing them to points to increase his look of shrewdness and inscrutability. Not a handsome man in one line of his rascally old face, not a nice man in one habit of his daily life, yet a man with something about him that caught upon the perception like a burr, and argued convincingly for some strength which lay beneath the smoky rind.

As long as he had practiced law in Saunders, and that ran back to the territorial days of Wyoming, and far back into them, at that, Charley Thomson had garbed himself with unvarying sameness, A blue woolen shirt, loose about his lean neck as the folded