Language has no words to picture our dumbfounded amazement. And we were
astonished in more ways than one. Chiefly, instead of the lank invalid
we expected to see, we beheld a burly giant every characteristic of
whom, save one, bespoke rugged health. He was all of six foot three,
big boned, overlaid with a surplus of brawn, a Samsonian musculature
that showed plain through his negligent, loose clothing; and withal
he was plump and would have been sleek but for the roughness of his
weather-beaten skin.
He wore gray; a broad-brimmed felt hat, almost a sombrero; a flannel
shirt, a sort of jacket, and corduroy trousers tucked into his boots.
It was before the days of khaki.
His head was large and round, but not at all a bullet head, rather
handsome and well set. His face was round too, and good-natured,
but not a particle as is the usual round face, vacuous and like a
full-moon. His was agreeable, but lit with character and determination.
His neck was fat but showed great cords through its rotundity. He had a
big barrel of a chest and his voice rumbled out of it. He dominated the
landscape the moment he entered it.
Even in our astonishment three things about him struck me, and, as I
afterwards found out, the same three similarly struck Beverly.
One was his complexion. He had that build which leads one to expect
floridity of face, a rubicund countenance or, at least, ruddy cheeks.
But he was dead pale, with a peculiar tint I never had seen before. His
face showed an abundance of solid muscle and over it a skin roughened
by exposure, toughened, even hardened by wind and sun. Yet its color
was not in agreement with its texture. It had the hue which belongs to
waxy skin over suety, tallowy flesh, an opaque whiteness, a pallidity
almost corpse-like.
The second was his glance: keen, glittering, hard, blue-gray eyes he
had, gallant and far younger than himself. But it was not the handsome
eyes so much as their way of looking that whetted our attention. They
pierced us through and through, they darted incessantly here and there,
they peered to right and left, they kept us generally in view, indeed,
and never let us feel that his attention wandered from us, yet they
incessantly swept the world about him. You should say they saw all they
looked at, looked at everything seeable.
The third was his belt, a mellowed old belt of pig-skin, with two
capacious holsters, from each of which protruded the butt of a
large-calibre revolver.
He greeted us in the spirit of old comradeship renewed. Behind him Jeff
and Cato grinned from their tired mounts. He sat his big horse with no
sign of fatigue and surveyed the landscape from the cross-roads’ knoll
where we had met him.
“I seem to recall the landmarks here,” he said, “the left hand road by
which you came, would take me through to Brexington.”
Beverly confirmed his recollection.
“The one straight ahead,” he went on, “goes past the big new distillery
you wrote me about.”
“Right again,” I said.
“The road to the right,” he continued, “will take us by the old mill,
and I can swing round to my camp without nearing town.”
“You could,” Beverly told. “But it is a long way round.”
“Not too far for me,” he announced positively. “No towns or
distilleries for me. I go round. Will you ride with me, gentlemen?”
We rode with him.
On the way I told him I expected him to supper that evening.
“With all my writing, Radford,” he said. “You don’t seem to get the
idea. I flock by myself for the present and eat alone. If you insist
I’ll explain to-morrow.”
Beverly and I left him to his camp supper.
Dr. Boone and Mr. Hall were a good deal taken aback upon learning that
their imagined invalid had no existence and that the real Colonel Case
needed neither medical assistance nor spiritual solace. We four sat for
some time expressing our bewilderment.
Next morning I drove out to Case’s Camp. I found him sitting in his
tent, the flaps of which were looped up all around. He was as pale
as the day before. As I approached I saw him scrutinize me with a
searching gaze, a gaze I found it difficult to analyze.
He wore his belt with the holsters and the revolver-butts showed from
those same holsters. I was astonished at this. When I saw it on him
the day before I had thought the belt a piece of bad taste. It might
have been advisable in portions of his long ride, might have been
imperatively necessary in some districts; but it seemed a pose or a
stupidity to wear it so far east. Pistols were by no means unknown in
our part of the world, but they were carried in the seclusion of the
hip-pocket or inside the breast of one’s coat, not flaunted in the face
of the populace in low-hung pig-skin holsters.
Case greeted me cheerily.
“I got up too early,” he stated. “I’ve had my breakfast and done my
target practice twice over. Apparently you expect me to go with you in
that buggy?”