"I've got to have the
mail. I'm David Kinemon too; and I wouldn't step round to your back
door, Hatburn--not if there was a boiling of you!"
"You'll learn you this," one of the others broke in: "it will be the
sweetest breath you ever draw'd when you get out that back door!"
The elder moved on to the pounded earth beyond. Here, in their
presence, David felt the loathing for the Hatburns a snake inspires--
dusty brown rattlers and silent cottonmouths. His hatred obliterated
every other feeling but a dim consciousness of the necessity to recover
the mail bag. He was filled with an overpowering longing to revenge
Allen; to mark them with the payment of his father, dead in the stable
shed.
His objective senses were abnormally clear, cold: he saw every detail
of the Hatburns' garb--the soiled shirts with buttoned pockets on their
left breasts; the stained baggy breeches in heavy boots--such boots as
had stamped Allen into nothingness; dull yellow faces and beady eyes;
the long black hair about their dark ears.
The idiot thrust his fingers into his loose mouth, his shirt open on a
hairy pendulous chest. The Hatburn who had not yet spoken showed a row
of tobacco-brown broken teeth.
"He mightn't get a heave on that breath," he asserted.
The latter lounged over against a set of open shelves where, David saw,
lay a heavy rusted revolver. Hatburn picked up the weapon and turned it
slowly in his thin grasp.
"I'm carrying the mail," David repeated, his hand on the bag.
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