The five were met at the steps by the proprietor of the boarding-
house. This man was short and stout, with a harelip and cleft
palate, which at once gave him the well-known slurring speech of
persons so afflicted, and imparted also to the timbre of his voice
a peculiarly hollow, resonant, trumpet-like note. He stumped about
energetically on a wooden leg of home manufacture. It was a
cumbersome instrument, heavy, with deep pine socket for the stump,
and a projecting brace which passed under a leather belt around the
man's waist. This instrument he used with the dexterity of a third
hand. As Thorpe watched him, he drove in a projecting nail, kicked
two "turkeys" dexterously inside the open door, and stuck the
armed end of his peg-leg through the top and bottom of the whisky
jug that one of the new arrivals had set down near the door. The
whisky promptly ran out. At this the cripple flirted the impaled
jug from the wooden leg far out over the rail of the verandah into
the snow.

A growl went up.

"What'n hell's that for I!" snarled one of the owners of the
whisky threateningly.

"Don't allow no whisky here," snuffed the harelip.

The men were very angry. They advanced toward the cripple, who
retreated with astonishing agility to the lighted room. There he
bent the wooden leg behind him, slipped the end of the brace from
beneath the leather belt, seized the other, peg end in his right
hand, and so became possessed of a murderous bludgeon. This he