Fully clothed to the
last detail, precisely as those who had dealings at the bank might
have seen Campbell Wood any week-day morning for the past eight
months. A man does not sleep with his clothes on. The skull of the
man had been broken, as if with a blunt instrument of iron. On the
charred lacework of the floor lay the leg of an old andiron with
which Boaz Negro and his Angelina had set up housekeeping in that
new house.
It needed only Mr. Asa Whitelaw, coming up the street from that
gaping "Noah's Ark" at the bank, to round out the scandalous circle
of circumstance.
"Where is Manuel?"
Boaz Negro still sat in his shop, impassive, monumental, his thick,
hairy arms resting on the arms of his chair. The tools and materials
of his work remained scattered about him, as his irresolute
gathering of the night before had left them. Into his eyes no change
could come. He had lost his house, the visible monument of all those
years of "skinning his fingers." It would seem that he had lost his
son. And he had lost something incalculably precious--that hitherto
unquenchable exuberance of the man.
"Where is Manuel?"
When he spoke his voice was unaccented and stale, like the voice of
a man already dead.
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