The sense of kinship with the crowd that had unerringly drawn Marley left him the moment he was in the crowd, and a loneliness replaced the sense of kinship. He looked about for some one he knew. He began, here and there, to recognize faces, just as he had recognized voices in the din above him; he began to analyze and to classify the crowd, and he laughed somewhat cynically when he saw numbers of politicians going about among the farmers, shaking their hands, greeting them effusively, calling them by their Christian names. Then suddenly he saw Wade Powell. The crowd at the point where Powell stood, nucleated with him as its center; by the way the men were laughing, and by the way Powell was trying not to laugh, Marley knew that he had been telling them one of his stories, and from the self-conscious, guilty expressions on certain of the faces, Marley knew that the story was probably one that should not have been told. Several countrymen hung on the edge of the group, not identifying themselves with it, yet anxious to have a look at Wade Powell, who enjoyed the fame of the county's best criminal lawyer.
When Powell saw Marley he called to him, and when Marley drew near, he introduced him, somehow mysteriously, almost surreptitiously, to the man at his elbow. Powell's face was very red, and his eyes were brilliant. The mystery he put into his introduction was but a part of his manner.
"This is Mr. Carman, of Pleasant Grove Township, Glenn," he said, bending over, as if no one should hear the name; and then he added, in a husky whisper: "He's our candidate for county clerk, you know."
Marley saw something strange, forbidding, in Carman's face, but he could not tell what it was. It was a red, sunburnt face, closely shaven, with a short mustache burned by the sun; the smile it wore seemed to be fixed and impersonal. Plainly the man had spent his days out of doors, though, it seemed, not healthfully, for his skin was dry and hardened, and his neck thin and wrinkled; he seemed to have known the hard work and the poor nourishment of a farm. Marley wondered what was the matter with Carman's face. But Powell was drawing them aside.
"Come over here," he was saying, "where we can be alone."