ible, flashing teeth had them flying
in every direction.

Jud promptly cuffed him back to the gate and bade him wait there.

On the front portico, his chair half-tilted back, his trousers in his
boot legs, and his feet on the balustrade rim, the uprights of which
were knocked out here and there, like broken teeth in a comb,--sat a
man in a slouch hat, smoking a cob pipe. He was in his shirt sleeves.
His face was flushed and red; his eyes were watery, bleared. His head
was fine and long--his nose and chin seemed to meet in a sharp point.
His face showed that form of despair so common in those whom whiskey
has helped to degenerate. He did not smile--he scowled continuously,
and his voice had been imprecatory so long that it whined in the same
falsetto twang as one of his hounds.

Jud stepped forward and bowed obsequiously.

"How are you to-day, Majah, sah?" he asked while his puckered and
wrinkled face tried to smile.

Jud was chameleon. Long experience had taught him to drop
instinctively into the mannerism--even the dialect--of those he hoped
to cajole. With the well-bred he could speak glibly, and had airs
himself. With the illiterate and the low-bred, he could out-Caliban
the herd of them.

The man did not take the pipe out of his mouth. He did not even turn
his head. Only his two bleared eyes shot sidewise down to the
ground, where ten feet below him stood the employment agent of the
mills, smiling, smirking, and doing his best to spell out on the
signboard of his unscrupulous face the fact that he came in peace and
good will.

Major Edward Conway scarcely grunted--it might have been anything
from an oath to an eructation. Then, taking his pipe-stem from
between his teeth, and shifting his tobacco in his mouth,--for he was
both chewing and smoking--he expectorated squarely into the eyes of a
hound which had followed Jud up the steps, barking and snarling at
his heels.

He was a good marksman even with spittle, and the dog fled, whining.

Then he answered, with an oath, that he was about as well as the
rheumatism and the beastly weather would permit.

Jud came up uninvited and sat down. The Major did not even turn his
head. The last of a long line of gentlemen did not waste his manners
on one beneath him socially.

Jud was discreetly silent, and soon the Major began to tell all of
his troubles, but in the tone of one who was talking to his servant
and with many oaths and much bitterness:

"You see it'