his stepbrother, Levi West. He was not
dead; he had come home again. For a time not a sound broke the dead,
unbroken silence excepting the crackling of the blaze in the fireplace
and the sharp ticking of the tall clock in the corner. The one face,
dull and stolid, with the light of the candle shining upward over its
lumpy features, looked fixedly, immovably, stonily at the other,
sharp, shrewd, cunning--the red wavering light of the blaze shining
upon the high cheek bones, cutting sharp on the nose and twinkling in
the glassy turn of the black, ratlike eyes. Then suddenly that face
cracked, broadened, spread to a grin. "I have come back again, Hi,"
said Levi, and at the sound of the words the speechless spell was
broken.

Hiram answered never a word, but he walked to the fireplace, set the
candle down upon the dusty mantelshelf among the boxes and bottles,
and, drawing forward a chair upon the other side of the hearth, sat
down.

His dull little eyes never moved from his stepbrother's face. There
was no curiosity in his expression, no surprise, no wonder. The heavy
under lip dropped a little farther open and there was more than usual
of dull, expressionless stupidity upon the lumpish face; but that was
all.

As was said, the face upon which he looked was strangely, marvelously
changed from what it had been when he had last seen it nine years
before, and, though it was still the face of Levi West, it was a very
different Levi West than the shiftless ne'er-do-well who had run away
to sea in the Brazilian brig that long time ago. That Levi West had
been a rough, careless, happy-go-lucky fellow; thoughtless and
selfish, but with nothing essentially evil or sinister in his nature.
The Levi West that now sat in a rush-bottom chair at the other side of
the fireplace had that stamped upon his front that might be both evil
and sinister. His swart complexion was tanned to an Indian copper. On
one side of his face was a curious discoloration in the skin and a
long, crooked, cruel scar that ran diagonally across forehead and
temple and cheek in a white, jagged seam. This discoloration was of a
livid blue, about the tint of a tattoo mark. It made a patch the size
of a man's hand, lying across the cheek and the side of the neck.
Hiram could not keep his eyes from this mark and the white scar
cutting across it.

There was an odd sort of incongruity in Levi's dress; a pair of heavy
gold earrings and a dirty red handkerchief knott