ike Kid Bedloe and Buck Thornton were not to
be thought of as men, but rather as some rare species of clear-eyed,
unscrupulous, conscienceless animals; that they were not human, that it
would not be humane but foolish to regard them with any kind of
sympathy; that the law should set its iron heel upon them as a man might
set his heel upon a snake's flat, venomous head.

And she felt a hard contempt of self, she hated herself, when again and
again there rose before her mind's eye the form and face of the man who
surely was the worst of the lot, and yet who looked like a gentleman and
who knew how to carry himself like a gentleman, who knew what courtesy
to a woman was when he wanted to know, who had in a few hours made upon
her an impression which she realized shamefacedly would stay with her
always.

She had been in her room for an hour, driven by her loneliness had run
downstairs to chat a few minutes with Mrs. Riddell in the kitchen and,
unusually restless, had gone back upstairs. As she came again to her
window, she saw two men leave their horses at the front gate and turn
toward the house along the walk under the pear trees. Both were men whose
very stature would have drawn one's thoughts away from even pleasant
preoccupation, and Winifred Waverly's thoughts were sick of the channel
in which they had been running.

One, the one who came on slightly in front of his companion, was very
broad and heavy and thick. Thick of arm, of thigh, of neck. He was not
short, standing close to six feet, and yet his bigness of girth made him
seem of low, squat stature as she looked down upon him. She did not see
his face under the wide, soft hat but guessed it to be heavy like the
rest of him, square jawed and massive. She noted curiously that his
tread was light, that his whole being spoke of energy and swift
initiative, that the alertness of his carriage was an incongruity in a
man so heavily built from the great, monster shoulders of him to the
bulging calves.

The face of the other man she saw. His hat was far back upon his head
and as he come on his dark features fascinated her. He was tall, as tall
or nearly as tall as the Kid or Buck Thornton, she thought, slender,
full of the grace of perfect physical manhood. There was a dash to him
that, to the girl, was not without its charm. It spoke from the finely
chiselled lips, curved to a still, contemptuous smile, from the eyes,
long lashed, well set far apart, from the swingin