He took his squirrel
rifle from its hooks, but put it back again with a sigh. However
ethical and plausible the habit might be in the Cumberlands, perhaps
New York would not swallow his pose of hunting squirrels among the
skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but reliable Colt's revolver
that he resurrected from a bureau drawer seemed to proclaim itself
the pink of weapons for metropolitan adventure and vengeance.
This and a hunting-knife in a leather sheath, Sam packed in the
carpet-sack. As he started, muleback, for the lowland railroad
station the last Folwell turned in his saddle and looked grimly at
the little cluster of white-pine slabs in the clump of cedars that
marked the Folwell burying-ground.
Sam Folwell arrived in New York in the night. Still moving and living
in the free circles of nature, he did not perceive the formidable,
pitiless, restless, fierce angles of the great city waiting in the
dark to close about the rotundity of his heart and brain and mould
him to the form of its millions of re-shaped victims. A cabby picked
him out of the whirl, as Sam himself had often picked a nut from a
bed of wind-tossed autumn leaves, and whisked him away to a hotel
commensurate to his boots and carpet-sack.
On the next morning the last of the Folwells made his sortie into the
city that sheltered the last Harkness. The Colt was thrust beneath
his coat and secured by a narrow leather belt; the hunting-knife hung
between his shoulder-blades, with the haft an inch below his coat
collar.
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