The elder's azure gaze was set in a face
scarred and riven by hardship, debauch and disease; he had been--before
he had inevitably returned to the mountains where he was born--a
brakeman in the lowest stratum of the corruption of small cities on big
railroads; and his thin stooped body, his gaunt head and uncertain
hands, all bore the stamp of ruinous years. But in the midst of this
his eyes, like David's, retained their singularly tranquil color of
sweetness and innocence.
David was the youngest, the freshest thing imaginable; he was overtall
and gawky, his cheeks were as delicately rosy as apple blossoms, and
his smile was an epitome of ingenuous interest and frank wonder. It was
as if some quality of especial fineness, lingering unspotted in Hunter
Kinemon, had found complete expression in his son David. A great deal
of this certainly was due to his mother, a thick solid woman, who
retained more than a trace of girlish beauty when she stood back,
flushed from the heat of cooking, or, her bright eyes snapping, tramped
with heavy pails from the milking shed on a winter morning.
Both the Kinemon boys were engaging. Allen, almost twenty-one, was, of
course, the more conspicuous; he was called the strongest youth in
Greenstream County. He had his mother's brown eyes; a deep bony box of
a chest; rippling shoulders; and a broad peaceful countenance. He drove
the Crabapple stage, between Crabapple, the village just over the back
mountain, and Beaulings, in West Virginia.
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