No one was visible.
Hot tears filled his eyes as the stage rolled along past the moldy
ditch into which Allen had fallen. The mangy curs! His grip tightened
on the reins and the team broke into a clattering trot, speedily
leaving the Barren behind. But the day had been robbed of its sparkle,
his position of its pleasurable pride. He saw again his father's body
on the earthen floor of the stable, the bridle in his stiff fingers;
Allen carried into the house. And he, David Kinemon, had had to step
back, like a coward or a woman, and let the Hatburns triumph.
The stage drew up before the Beaulings post-office in the middle of the
afternoon. David delivered the mail bags, and then led the team back to
a stable on the grassy verge of the houses clustered at the end of
tracks laid precariously over a green plain to a boxlike station.
Beaulings had a short row of unpainted two-story structures, the single
street cut into deep muddy scars; stores with small dusty windows;
eating houses elevated on piles; an insignificant mission chapel with a
tar-papered roof; and a number of obviously masked depots for the
illicit sale of liquor.
A hotel, neatly painted white and green, stood detached from the main
activity. There, washing his face in a tin basin on a back porch, David
had his fried supper, sat for a while outside in the gathering dusk,
gazing at the crude-oil flares, the passing dark figures beyond, the
still obscured immensity of mountain and forest.
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