I had ado to keep my tongue from exclaiming when I turned. I do not
know why I expected the man to be small, except that I myself am overly
large, and that I was looking for him to be my antithesis in every way.
But the figure that loomed toward me out of the luminous mist dwarfed
my own stature. Never had my eyes seen so powerful a man. Long and
swinging as an elk, he had the immense, humped shoulders of a buffalo
and the length of arm of a baboon. His head would have sat well on
some rough bronze coin of an early day. Semitic in type he looked,
with his eagle-beaked nose and prominent cheek bones, but the blue of
his eyes was English. They were intelligent eyes.
He looked at me a moment, and I stood silent for his initiative. I
remembered that I was dressed roughly, was torn and rumpled by my
contest with the forest, and that I must appear an out-at-elbows
_coureur de bois_. He would not know me for the man he was seeking. I
waited for him to ask my name, and selected one to give him that was my
own and yet was not M. de Montlivet. Since names cannot be sold nor
squandered, my father had bequeathed me a plethora of them.
But I credited the Englishman with too little acuteness.
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