Did you see Mr. Harkless? I was up on them steps when he
begun. I don't believe he needs as much takin' care of as we think."
"Wasn't it one of them Cross-Roads devils that knocked his hat off?" asked
Judd Bennett. "I thought I see Bob Skillett run up with a club."
Harkless threw open the doors behind him; the hall was empty. "You may
come in now," he said. "This isn't my court-house."
CHAPTER VIII
GLAD AFTERNOON: THE GIRL BY THE BLUE TENT-POLE
They walked slowly back along the pike toward the brick house. The white-
ruffed fennel reached up its dusty yellow heads to touch her skirts as she
passed, and then drooped, satisfied, against the purple iron-weed at the
roadside. In the noonday silence no cricket chirped nor locust raised its
lorn monotone; the tree shadows mottled the road with blue, and the level
fields seemed to pant out a dazzling breath, the transparent "heat-waves"
that danced above the low corn and green wheat.
He was stooping very much as they walked; he wanted to be told that he
could look at her for a thousand years. Her face was rarely and
exquisitely modelled, but, perhaps, just now the salient characteristic of
her beauty (for the salient characteristic seemed to be a different thing
at different times) was the coloring, a delicate glow under the white
skin, that bewitched him in its seeming a reflection of the rich
benediction of the noonday sun that blazed overhead.
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