bit might be in the Cumberlands, perhaps
New York would not swallow his pose of hunting squirrels among the
skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but reliable Colt's revolver
that he resurrected from a bureau drawer seemed to proclaim itself
the pink of weapons for metropolitan adventure and vengeance.
This and a hunting-knife in a leather sheath, Sam packed in the
carpet-sack. As he started, muleback, for the lowland railroad
station the last Folwell turned in his saddle and looked grimly at
the little cluster of white-pine slabs in the clump of cedars that
marked the Folwell burying-ground.
Sam Folwell arrived in New York in the night. Still moving and living
in the free circles of nature, he did not perceive the formidable,
pitiless, restless, fierce angles of the great city waiting in the
dark to close about the rotundity of his heart and brain and mould
him to the form of its millions of re-shaped victims. A cabby picked
him out of the whirl, as Sam himself had often picked a nut from a
bed of wind-tossed autumn leaves, and whisked him away to a hotel
commensurate to his boots and carpet-sack.
On the next morning the last of the Folwells made his sortie into the
city that sheltered the last Harkness. The Colt was thrust beneath
his coat and secured by a narrow leather belt; the hunting-knife hung
between his shoulder-blades, with the haft an inch below his coat
collar. He knew this much--that Cal Harkness drove an express wagon
somewhere in that town, and that he, Sam Folwell, had come to kill
him. And as he stepped upon the sidewalk the red came into his eye
and the feud-hate into his heart.
The clamor of the central avenues drew him thitherward. He had half
expected to see Cal coming down the street in his shirt-sleeves,
with a jug and a whip in his hand, just as he would have seen him in
Frankfort or Laurel City. But an hour went by and Cal did not appear.
Perhaps he was waiting in ambush, to shoot him from a door or a
window. Sam kept a sharp eye on doors and windows for a while.
About noon the city tired of playing with its mouse and suddenly
squeezed him with its straight lines.
Sam Folwell stood where two great, rectangular arteries of the city
cross. He looked four ways, and saw the world hurled from its orbit
and reduced by spirit level and tape to an edged and cornered plane.
All life moved on tracks, in grooves, according to system, within
boundaries, by rote. The root of life was the cube ro
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