She was scrubbing blindly at the same glass when, a quarter of an hour
later, Blinky Lockwood strode into the store, his right eye twitching
more violently than usual, as it always does in his phases of mental
disturbance--as when, for instance, he fears he's going to lose a
dollar.
Lockwood is that type of man who was born to grow rich. He inherited a
farm or two in the vicinity of Radville and the one over Westerly way,
to which I have referred, and ... well, we've a homely paraphrase of a
noted aphorism in Radville: "Them as has, gits." Lockwood had, to begin
with, and he made it his business to get; and, as is generally the case
in this unbalanced world of ours, things came to him to which he had
never aspired. Fortune favoured him because he had no need of her
favours; the discovery of coal under his Westerly acres was wholly
adventitious, but it made him far and away the richest man in
Radville--with the possible exception of old Colonel Bohun's
traditional millions.
In person he is as beautiful as a snake-fence, as alluring as a stone
wall. Something over six feet in height, he walks with a stoop (one
hand always in a trouser-pocket jingling silver) that materially
detracts from his stature. His face, like his figure, is gaunt and
lanky, his nose an emaciated beak; his mouth illustrates his attitude
toward property--is a trap from which nothing of value ever escapes;
his eyes are small and hard and set close together under lowering
brows. He's grizzled, with hair not actually white, but grey as the iron
from which his heart was fashioned. Aside from these characteristics his
principal peculiarity is a nervous twitching of the right eye which has
earned him his sobriquet of Blinky. Legrand Gunn said he contracted the
affliction through squinting at the silver dollar to make sure none of
its milling had been worn off. ... I have never known the man to wear
anything but a rusty old frock coat, black, of course, and black and
shiny broadcloth trousers, with a hat that has always a coating of dust
so thick that it seems a mottled grey.
He grunts his words, a grunt to each. He grunted at Betty when he saw
her.
"Where's your father?"