Page:Rowland--The Mountain of Fears.djvu/109

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THE SHEARS OF ATROPOS

ture of the same courage but a higher power of imagination.

"'Maybe ye'd like to add to this same collection,' he said, and he said it with one mental arm raised toward, in a manner of speaking.

"Lynch laughed outright. It might have been a part of his—what you Americans call bluff, but I believe that it was sheer amusement. I began to be convinced that Lynch possessed a very keen sense of a very dangerous sort of humor. He saw the thing just as I saw it; of course he would see it so, because, although I was a trifle slow in discovering it, he had put this man 'McAdoo' on the witness stand the very moment he heard him speak, and he was cross-examining him and deriving infinite amusement from the process. Moreover, McAdoo himself, while too coarse-grained to understand it, was beginning to feel it, and there grew to be in his manœuvres something of the sweating nervousness of a horse at the howl of

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