Gloria would not hear to it; if she did want to lie down she’d go out under one of the trees and rest there.  She trudged along with him to the post-office; she watched as Mark called for and got a registered parcel.  Further, she marked that the postmaster appeared curious about the package so heavily insured until over Mark’s shoulder he caught a glimpse of her, and that thereafter, craning his neck as they went out, he evidenced a greater interest in her than in a bundle insured for three thousand dollars.  She was smiling brightly when Mark King hurried off to his meeting with old Loony Honeycutt.

Honeycutt’s shanty, ancient, twisted, warped, and ugly like himself, stood well apart from the flock of houses, as though, like himself even in this, it were suspicious and meant to keep its own business to itself.  Only one other building had approached it in neighbourly fashion, and this originally had been Honeycutt’s barn.  Now it had a couple of crazy windows cut crookedly into its sides and a stovepipe thrust up, also crookedly, through the shake roof, and was known as the McQuarry place.  Here one might count on finding Swen Brodie at such times as he favoured Coloma with his hulking presence; here foregathered his hangers-on.  An idle crowd for the most part, save when the devil found mischief for them to do, they might be expected to be represented by one or two of their number loafing about headquarters, and King realized that his visit to Loony Honeycutt was not likely to pass unnoticed.  What he had not counted on was finding Swen Brodie himself before him in Honeycutt’s shanty.

King, seeing no one, walked through the weeds to Honeycutt’s door.  The door was closed, the windows down—­dirty windows, every corner of every pane with its dirty cobweb trap and skeletons of flies.  As he lifted his foot to the first of the three front steps he heard voices.  Nor would any man who had once listened to the deep, sullen bass of Swen Brodie have forgotten or have failed now in quick recognition.  Brodie’s mouth, when he spoke, dripped the vilest of vocabularies that had ever been known in these mountains, very much as old Honeycutt’s toothless mouth, ever screwed up in rotary chewing and sucking movements, drooled tobacco juice upon his unclean shirt.  Brodie at moments when he desired to be utterly inoffensive could not purge his utterance of oaths; he was one of those men who could not remark that it was a fine morning without first damning the thing, qualifying it with an epithet of vileness, and turning it out of his big, loose mouth sullied with syllables which do not get themselves into print.

What King heard, as though Brodie had held his speech for the moment and hurled it like a challenge to the man he did not know had come, was, when stripped of its cargo of verbal filth: 

“You old fool, you’re dying right now.  It’s for me or Mark King to get it, and it ain’t going to be King.”