mother’s knee, and to leave it there. Randal was weaker than he knew when the blink from the office-window called him over the verandah to the door. Art flung it open at his knock, and Randal noticed, with a workman’s merciless pride, that both eyes were swelling under the bandage.
Scannell looked up from his desk, and Randal straightened, meeting the look defiantly. But neither man spoke. From the chair where he lay with both legs flung over the arm, Art Scannell was laughing.
“Go on, pater. Pitch it straight—then I will———”
“Hold your tongue,” said Scannell, unmoving, and his eyes ran, keen-searching, over the length of the man before him.
Randal’s coat and shirt were open in the cold night, and rain had beat the dust of them to mud. His dark hair was rough on the tanned forehead, and sweat and earth grimed each hard line that coarse living and soul-suffering had scored on the flesh. But, apart from the knotted hands drawn with corns, apart from the shoulder-stoop of the yoke-bound, and the restless-eyed sullenness that will take neither pity nor help, was the race-mark that no man may lose. Scannell felt for it, saying:
“You are not a liar, I think, Randal?”
“I never heard a man call me so,” said Randal, suggestively, and his hands shut up.
