Sitting now in the glare of the September sunshine on the flat roof of his cabin, he gravely and stolidly scrawled down the words of the verse as the Attean heliograph, blinking and glaring, spoke to him in the Morse code.
"Huh!" he grunted, and went on writing with stubby pencil his interrupted day's entry in his official diary. For the twenty-fifth time he wrote:
He screwed his eyelids close to peer into the heavens bending over him, hard as the bottom of a brass kettle. He took off his hat and held it edgewise at his forehead while his gaze swept the mighty range of his vision. An imaginative person might have smiled at the likeness between his brown and bald poll, thrust above the straggle of hair, and the bare and bald poll of old Jerusalem, rounding above the straggle of growth on its lower slopes.
Some one bawled at him from the ground below. Lane did not start, though that was the first human voice he had heard in two months.
The young man who stood there, and who had come across the gray ledges from the edge of the timber growth, carried an arm in a sling.
"Do you ever look at anybody if they're nearer than ten miles away?" inquired the visitor, with the teasing irony that it seemed popular in the Umcolcus region to employ with "Ladder" Lane.
When the old man stood up the fitness of his sobriquet was apparent. He unfolded himself, joint by joint, like a carpenter's rule, and stood gaunt as a bean pole and well towards seven feet in height.
The name painted on the door of the photograph "saloon" that even now lies rotting on the banks of Ragmuff in Castonia settlement is: "Linus Lane. Tintypes and Views." No one in Castonia ever knew whither he had come. Oxen or horses and a teamster hired for each trip had dragged the rumbling van from settlement to settlement at the edge of the woods, and finally to Castonia, where it arrived hobbling on three wheels, one corner supported by a dragging sapling. Lane strode ahead, swearing over his shoulder at the driver, and his ill-temper did not seem to leave him even when he had opened his door for business. It is remembered that his first customer was old Bailey, who was corresponding with an unknown woman down-country, and who came for a tintype with hair and whiskers colored to the hue of the raven's wing, evidently desiring to make an impression on his correspondent. And when old Bailey, shocked and disappointed at the painful verity of the tintype, had muttered that it didn't seem to be a very pretty picture, Lane, who was doubled like a jack-knife under the saloon's low roof, had yelled at him: