Gunman's Reckoning eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 308 pages of information about Gunman's Reckoning.

Gunman's Reckoning eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 308 pages of information about Gunman's Reckoning.

Donnegan was taken aback again, and this time more strongly than by the flare of light against his eyes.  For in the voice he recognized the quality of the girl—­the same softness, the same velvety richness, though the pitch was a bass.  In the voice of this man there was the same suggestion that the tone would crack if it were forced either up or down.  With this great difference, one could hardly conceive of a situation which would push that man’s voice beyond its monotone.  It flowed with deadly, all-embracing softness.  It clung about one; it fascinated and baffled the mind of the listener.

But Donnegan was not in the habit of being baffled by voices.  Neither was he a lover of formality.  He looked about for a place to sit down, and immediately discovered that while the invalid sat in an enormous easy-chair bordered by shelves and supplied with wheels for raising and lowering the back and for propelling the chair about the room on its rubber tires, it was the only chair in the room which could make any pretensions toward comfort.  As a matter of fact, aside from this one immense chair, devoted to the pleasure of the invalid, there was nothing in the room for his visitors to sit upon except two or three miserable backless stools.

But Donnegan was not long taken aback.  He tucked his cap under his arm, bowed profoundly in honor of the colonel’s compliments, and brought one of the stools to a place where it was no nearer the rather ominous circle of the lamplight than was the invalid himself.  With his eyes accustomed to the new light, Donnegan could now take better stock of his host.  He saw a rather handsome face, with eyes exceedingly blue, young, and active; but the features of Macon as well as his body were blurred and obscured by a great fatness.  He was truly a prodigious man, and one could understand the stoutness with which the invalid chair was made.  His great wrist dimpled like the wrist of a healthy baby, and his face was so enlarged with superfluous flesh that the lower part of it quite dwarfed the upper.  He seemed, at first glance, a man with a low forehead and bright, careless eyes and a body made immobile by flesh and sickness.  A man whose spirits despised and defied pain.  Yet a second glance showed that the forehead was, after all, a nobly proportioned one, and for all the bulk of that figure, for all the cripple-chair, Donnegan would not have been surprised to see the bulk spring lightly out of the chair to meet him.

For his own part, sitting back on the stool with his cap tucked under his arm and his hands folded about one knee, he met the faint, cold smile of the colonel with a broad grin of his own.

“I can put it in a nutshell,” said Donnegan.  “I was tired; dead beat; needed a handout, and rapped at your door.  Along comes a mystery in the shape of an ugly-looking woman and opens the door to me.  Tries to shut me out; I decided to come in.  She insists on keeping me outside; all at once I see that I have to get into the house.  I am brought in; your daughter tries to steer me off, sees that the job is more than she can get away with, and shelves me off upon you.  And that, Colonel Macon, is the pleasant accident which brings you the favor of this call.”

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Gunman's Reckoning from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.