It should also be said here that among her many pupils who lived beyond
the sky-line of the far, blue hills, not one knew more of the
real secret of Auntie Sue's life and character than did the Ozark
mountaineers of the Elbow Rock district, among whom she had chosen to
pass the evening of her day.
Then came one who learned the secret. He learned--but that is my story.
I must not tell the secret here.
CHAPTER II.
THE MAN IN THE DARK.
A man stood at a window, looking out into the night. There was no light
in the room. The stars were hidden behind a thick curtain of sullen
clouds.
The house was a wretchedly constructed, long-neglected building of
a type common to those old river towns that in their many years of
uselessness have lost all civic pride, and in their own resultant
squalor and filth have buried their self-respect. A dingy, scarcely
legible sign over the treacherous board walk, in front, by the sickly
light of a smoke-grimed kerosene lantern, announced that the place was a
hotel.
Dark as it was, the man at the window could see the river. The trees
that lined the bank opposite the town were mere ghostly shadows against
the gloomy masses of the low hills that rose from the water's edge,
indistinct, mysterious, and unreal, into the threatening sky. The higher
mountains that reared their crests beyond the hills were invisible.
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