malice of mockery or
mirth, as he pointed it out to his companion with a sort of triumph in
its splenetic contortions.

He was a big, bluff fellow, to whose pride all that befell him seemed
to minister. He was proud of his length of limb, and his hundred and
eighty pounds of weight, and yet his slim appearance. "Ye wouldn't
believe it now, would ye?" he was wont to say when he stepped off the
scales at the store of the hamlet down in the Cove. "It's solid meat
an' bone an' muscle, my boy. Keep on the friendly side of one hunderd
an' eighty," with a challenging wink. He was proud of his bright brown
eyes, and his dark hair and mustache, and smiling, handsome face, and
his popularity among the class that he was pleased to denominate "gal
critters." He piqued himself upon his several endowments as a hardy
woodsman, his endurance, his sylvan craft, his pluck, and his luck and
his accurate aim. The buck--all gray and antlered, for it was
August--that hung across the horse, behind the saddle, gave token of
this keen exactitude in the tiny wound at the base of the ear, where
the rifle-ball had entered to pierce the brain; it might seem to the
inexpert that death had come rather from the gaping knife-stroke
across the throat, which was, however, a mere matter of butcher-craft.
He was proud of the good strong bay horse that he rode, which so
easily carried double, and proud of his big boots and long spurs; and
he scorned flimsy town clothes, and thought that good home-woven blue
jeans was the gear in which a man who was a man should clothe himself
withal. He glanced more than once at the different toggery of his
companion, evidently a man of cities, whom he had chanced to meet by
the wayside, and with whom he had journeyed more than a mile.

He had paused again and again to point out the "witch-face" to the
stranger, who at first could not discern it at all, and then when it
suddenly broke upon him could not be wiled away from it. He
dismounted, hitching his horse to a sapling, and up and down he
patrolled the rocky mountain path to study the face at various angles;
Constant Hite looking on the while with an important placid
satisfaction, as if he had invented the illusion.

"Some folks, though, can't abide sech ez witches," he said, with a
tolerant smile, as if he were able to defy their malevolence and make
light of it. "Ye see that cabin on the spur over yander around the
bend?" It looked very small and solitary from this