he had limited himself in thought, but his entire
month's salary, -- he might lose all by the lack of a
paltry dollar or so.

He was dressed with more care than on the day
previous: he wore a dark suit, the coat to which now
swung on a stick over his shoulder, a rubber collar,
a tie of orange brocade erected on a superstructure
of cardboard; his head was covered by a hard, black
felt hat, pushed back from his sweating brow, and
his trousers hung from a pair of obviously home-knitted,
yarn suspenders. He shifted the stick from
right to left. His revolver dragged chafing against
a leg, and he removed it and thrust it into a pocket
of the coat.

He followed by turn an old rutted postroad and
faint, forest trails, and shortened distances by breaking
through the trackless underbrush, watching subconsciously
for rattlesnakes. The sun slowly declined,
its rays fell diagonally, lengthening, through
the trees; in a glade the air seemed filled with gold
dust; the sky burned in a single flame of apricot.
The air, rather than grow dark, appeared to thicken
with raw color, with mauve and ultramarine, silver
and cinnabar.

When he arrived at the little, deeply-grassed plain
that held Sprucesap, it was bathed in a flaring afterglow,
a magical, floating light. A double row of
board structures faced each other across a street of

[[53]]

p052 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p053w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p054

v?