After
that he was quite at home. This was singular, too, for his life had been
of recent years much out of the beaten tracks of civilization. He got the
outlines of Herridon in an hour or two, and by evening he could have drawn
a pretty accurate chart of it, both as to detail and from the point of a
birdseye view at the top of the moor.
The moor had delighted him. He looked away to all quarters and saw hill
and valley wrapped in that green. He saw it under an almost cloudless sky,
and he took off his hat and threw his grizzled head back with a boyish
laugh.
"It's good--good enough!" he said. "I've seen so much country all on edge
that this is like getting a peep over the wall on the other side--the
other side of Jordan. And yet that was God's country with the sun on it,
as Gladney used to say--poor devil!"
He dropped his eyes from the prospect before him and pushed the sod and
ling with his foot musingly. "If I had been in Gladney's place, would I
have done as he did, and if he had been in my place would he have done as
I did? One thing is certain, there'd have been bad luck for both of us,
this way or that, with a woman in the equation. He was a fool--that's the
way it looked, and I was a liar--to all appearances, and there's no heaven
on earth for either.
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