The eyes--though now they were weary with travel and something more fundamental, too, than physical fatigue--were luminous of quality and a singularly clear gray of colour. They were such eyes as could be dogged and stern as flint or deep and bafflingly gentle like mossy waters.
Covering the bony flanks of the mule and bulging grotesquely to port and starboard, hung capacious canvas saddle pockets--and as the stranger drew rein the boy's eyes dwelt with candid inquisitiveness upon them. Out of the cavernous maw of one of these receptacles protruded the corner of a tin dispatch box and fastened to a cantle ring behind the saddle was a long, slender object in a water-proof covering laced at the top.
At sight of that, Boone's eyes livened yet more, for he recognized the shrouded shape though it was a thing almost as foreign to his world as starlight is to the floor of the sea. Once he had been to Marlin Town on a troubled Court day when a detachment of militia had stood guard in the square to overawe warring factions and avert bloodshed. Their failure to do so is another story, but their commanding officer had worn a sabre, and now with a stirring excitement the boy divined that, this "qu'ar contraption" dangling at the newcomer's back was nothing less portentous than a sword!
Straightway the drab curtain of life's unrelief was rent for Boone Wellver, and shot through with gleaming filaments of wonderment and imaginative speculation. Here, of a sudden, came Romance on horseback, and what matter that the horse was a mule?
"Son," he said in a kindly manner, "I'm bound for Cyrus Spradling's house, and I begin to suspect that I must have lost my way. How about it?"
Boone did not immediately reply. He merely poured out of his wide and innocent blue eyes a scrutiny as inquisitorial as though he had been stationed here on picket duty and were vested with full authority to halt whomsoever approached.
While the newcomer sat, waiting in his saddle, Boone Wellver vaulted lightly down from fence rail to gravel roadway and, standing there as slim yet as sturdy as a hickory sapling, raised one hand towards the mule's flank, but arrested it midway as he inquired, "Thet critter o' yourn--hit don't foller kickin', does hit?"