Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/17

 across her forehead and knotting it behind. This added to the Gipsy piquancy of her dark face, the Gipsy mystery of her melancholy eyes, which seemed always to speak so much and yet to say so little that men could understand.

One of these men at Magdalena's kitchen table—the legs of it were hewn from cedar beams, it would have upheld an elephant—was a familiar figure in that smoky room. Borromeo Cambon, this was, a man who could beat out on his anvil any tool or instrument of metal that the need of man required, let it be a fishhook or hoe, copper cauldron or griddle-iron, scythe or sword. Borromeo was a man of great stature and strength, a man whose broad hands were the endowment of generations of men grown mighty in the wrestle with stubborn metals. His black beard was short and curly, his face red-brown, like a tile.

The other man taking refreshment from Magdalena's bounty wore a soldier's garb; a beardless lean and weathered man. His sword-belt and brassbound pistols hung on his chair-post close to his hand, as if he had compromised between the exactions of hospitality and the demands of duty, not going very far in either direction, This soldier appeared worn from many years afield; his brindled hair was shaggy, rough and long, but there was a merry light in his quick grey eyes, a smile that came easily to his close-fitting lips. The hardships and sacrifices of the wilderness, long association with austere and exacting men, had not caused him to