Night, as though it had leaped upon the back of the storm and had ridden hitherward on the wings of the wind all impatience to defy the laws of daylight, was in truth mistress of the mountains a full hour or more before the invisible sun’s allotted time of setting.  In the storm-smitten, lonely building at the foot of the rocky slope, shivering as though with the cold, rocking crazily as though in startled fear at each gust, the roaring log fire in the open fireplace made an uncertain twilight and innumerable ghostlike shadows.  The wind whistling down the chimney, making that eerie sound known locally as the voice of William Henry, came and went fitfully.  Poke Drury, the cheerful, one-legged keeper of the road house, swung back and forth up and down on his one crutch, whistling blithely with his guest of the chimney and lighting the last of his coal oil lamps and candles.

“She’s a Lu-lu bird, all right,” acknowledged Poke Drury.  He swung across his long “general room” to the fireplace, balanced on his crutch while he shifted and kicked at a fallen burning log with his one boot, and then hooked his elbows on his mantel.  His very black, smiling eyes took cheerful stock of his guests whom the storm had brought him.  They were many, more than had ever at one time honoured the Big Pine road house.  And still others were coming.

“If Hap Smith ain’t forgot how to sling a four horse team through the dark, huh?” continued the landlord as he placed still another candle at the south window.

In architectural design Poke Drury’s road house was as simple an affair as Poke Drury himself.  There was but one story:  the whole front of the house facing the country road was devoted to the “general room.”  Here was a bar, occupying the far end.  Then there were two or three rude pine tables, oil-cloth covered.  The chairs were plentiful and all of the rawhide bottom species, austere looking, but comfortable enough.  And, at the other end of the barn like chamber was the long dining table.  Beyond it a door leading to the kitchen at the back of the house.  Next to the kitchen the family bed room where Poke Drury and his dreary looking spouse slept.  Adjoining this was the one spare bed room, with a couple of broken legged cots and a wash-stand without any bowl or pitcher.  If one wished to lave his hands and face or comb his hair let him step out on the back porch under the shoulder of the mountain and utilize the road house toilet facilities there:  they were a tin basin, a water pipe leading from a spring and a broken comb stuck after the fashion of the country in the long hairs of the ox’s tail nailed to the porch post.