great contempt in the slewing of his mouth. He threw down his knife, and stood facing Mrs. Cowgill, jerking at the strings of his coffee-sack apron as if through with the job.
Angus was a short-built young man, heavy in the thighs, his shoulders thick, his arms short and strong. His black hair was brushed to such a polish that a spider would have needed a hand-line to climb it. His face was round and boyish, his little snub nose quite comical in the midst of his present bluster. But for the black whiskers which crowded his fair ruddy skin, so thick and so fast-growing that no amount of shaving could keep them out of sight, Angus would have looked in the face like a hearty, full-blooded boy of twelve. As it was, he looked twelve, with the whiskers of forty-five.
He was the son of Doctor Macdougal, one child of many children. Doctor competition was sharp in McPacken; Angus had been crowded out to shift for himself when he should have been finishing the grade school, yet not before his whiskers had marked him for an early-ripening man. He could not get a job as brakeman—even conductors, in their consequence and grandeur, must begin there—until he became twenty-one. The Cottonwood Hotel was a very good place to fill the intervening years, which Angus had breasted until only two now stood between him and his happy day of matriculation in the college of conductors.
It was the habit of people native to McPacken, as well as those of transplanted stock who remained in its
