n 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."

Honeycutt all the time was whining like a feeble spirit in pain, his
utterances like the final dwindlings of a mean-spirited dog. King had
never heard him whine like that; Honeycutt was more given to chucklings
and clackings of defiance and derision. Perhaps Brodie as the ultimate
argument had manhandled him. King threw open the door.

There stood old Honeycutt, tremblingly upheld upon his sawed-off
broom-handle. Beyond him, facing the door, was Swen Brodie, his immense
body towering over Honeycutt's spindling one, his bestial face hideous
in its contortions as at once he gloated and threatened. In Brodie's
hands, which were twice the size of an ordinary man's, was a little
wooden box, to which Honeycutt's rheumy eyes were glued with frantic
despair. Evidently the box had only now been taken from its hiding-place
under a loose board in the floor; the board lay tossed to one side, and
Brodie's legs straddled the opening.

Honeycutt did not know immediately that any one had entered; either his
old ears had not heard, or his excited mind was concentrated so
excludingly