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 pause only to rest a moment, when he intended to gather himself and break forward faster than before.

He appeared to be smiling, although his face remained set, his lips immobile. It was that light of great eagerness, or great ambition, or great hope, in his eyes that seemed to illumine his face with pleasure. In a little while he took up his heavy luggage and crossed over to the hotel.

Jim Justice, proprietor of the West Plains hotel, was sitting on his porch in a chair bottomed with hickory bark, in the very spot where he would be found, from that time of the year forward, until the wind began to roll tumble-weed in the autumn, and whip clouds of dust against his windows in stifling assault. Jim's chair-posts had notches worn into the side of the house where he leaned; the hinder legs had sockets drilled into the floor of the porch. He was anchored in the serene comfort of proprietorship; he would no more lower his tilted chair to rise and meet a guest than he would stand on his head in the middle of the road.

Justice had been a Missouri bushwhacker in the days of the Southern rebellion. While he had been a rebel in spirit, it was a spirit small in proportion to his body, altogether inadequate to the task of carrying him out into the open to uphold his sentiments. Those days of brush-skulking were far behind Jim now, to be sure, but the habit of them endured as close-fitting upon him as his own skin. While he might not shoot a man from ambush any longer, he would take under-handed advantage of him in every other way.

Justice was a thick, short man, rounding out like a pigeon in front, standing with something of a pigeon