The depth and breadth of that chest, its
resilience, and its relaxed and plastic muscles, tokened the knotty
strength that still resided in him. Further, no bronze and beat of
sun and wind availed to hide the testimony of his skin that he was
all haole--a white man.
On his back, his great white beard, thrust skyward, untrimmed of
barbers, stiffened and subsided with every breath, while with the
outblow of every exhalation the white moustache erected
perpendicularly like the quills of a porcupine and subsided with
each intake. A young girl of fourteen, clad only in a single
shift, or muumuu, herself a grand-daughter of the sleeper, crouched
beside him and with a feathered fly-flapper brushed away the flies.
In her face were depicted solicitude, and nervousness, and awe, as
if she attended on a god.
And truly, Hardman Pool, the sleeping whiskery one, was to her, and
to many and sundry, a god--a source of life, a source of food, a
fount of wisdom, a giver of law, a smiling beneficence, a blackness
of thunder and punishment--in short, a man-master whose record was
fourteen living and adult sons and daughters, six great-
grandchildren, and more grandchildren than could he in his most
lucid moments enumerate.
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