accents, how she, too, had been frayed by a _spectre in the street_!

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO.

THE "CHOCTAW CHIEF."

"You'll excuse me, stranger, for interruptin' you in the readin' o' your
newspaper. I like to see men in the way o' acquirin' knowledge. But
we're all of us here goin' to licker up. Won't you join?"

The invitation, brusquely, if not uncourteously, extended, comes from a
man of middle age, in height at least six feet three, without reckoning
the thick soles of his bull-skin boots--the tops of which rise several
inches above the knee. A personage, rawboned, and of rough exterior,
wearing a red blanket-coat; his trousers tucked into the aforesaid
boots; with a leather belt buckled around his waist, under the coat, but
over the haft of a bowie-knife, alongside which peeps out the butt of a
Colt's revolving pistol. In correspondence with his clothing and
equipment, he shows a cut-throat countenance, typical of the State
Penitentiary; cheeks bloated as from excessive indulgence in drink; eyes
watery and somewhat bloodshot; lips thick and sensual; with a nose set
obliquely, looking as if it had received hard treatment in some
pugilistic encounter. His hair is of a yellowish clay colour, lighter
in tint upon the eyebrows. There is none either on his lips or jaws,
nor yet upon his thick hog-like throat; which looks as if some day it
may need something stiffer than a beard to protect it from the hemp of
the hangman.

He, to whom the invitation has been extended, is of quite a different
appearance. In age a little over half that of the individual who has
addressed him; complexion dark and cadaverous; the cheeks hollow and
haggard, as from sleepless anxiety; the upper lip showing two elongated
bluish blotches--the stub of moustaches recently removed; the eyes coal
black, with sinister glances sent in suspicious furtiveness from under a
broad hat-brim pulled low down over the brow; the figure fairly shaped,
but with garments coarse and clumsily fitting, too ample both for body
and limbs, as if intended to conceal rather than show them to advantage.

A practised detective, after scanning this individual, taking note of
his habiliments, with the hat and his manner of wearing it, would
pronounce him a person dressed in disguise--this, for some good reason,
adopted. A suspicion of the kind appears to be in the mind of the rough
Hercules, who has invited him to "licker up;" though _he_ is no
detective.