contort his rubbery lip, and laugh down his nose in forced snarls of gratification and triumph.
This was the old man who, even now, as his nephew sped to meet him, stood in his dusty little office clutching his raw and bony hands across his waist.
In spite of the bewildering elaboration of his uncle’s direction, the boy found his offices without much trouble. He went in and a moment later, his hand was being vigorously pumped by his uncle’s great stiff paw, and he heard that instant howling voice of welcome—the voice of a prophet calling from the mountain-tops—coming to him without preliminary or introduction, as he had heard it last eight years before.
“Oh, hello, hello, hello…. How are you, how are you, how are you?… Say!” his uncle turned abruptly and in a high howling tone addressed several people who were staring at the young man curiously, “I want you all to meet my sister’s youngest son—my nephew, Mr. Eugene Gant… and say!” he bawled again, but in remoter tone, in a strangely confiding and insinuating tone—“would you know he was a Pentland by the look of him?… Can you see the family resemblance?” He smacked his rubbery lips together with an air of relish, and suddenly threw his great gaunt arms up and let them fall with an air of ecstatic jubilation, squinted his small sharp eyes together, contorted his rubbery lips in their amazing and grotesque grimace, and stamping ecstatically at the floor with one long stringy leg, taking random ecstatic kicks at any object that was within reach, he began to snuffle with his strange forced laughter, and howled deliriously, “Oh, my, yes!… The thing is evident…. He is a Pentland beyond the shadow of a vestige of a doubt!… Oh, by all means, by all means, by all means!” and he went on snuffling, stamping, howling, and kicking at random objects in this way until the strange seizure of his mirth had somewhat subsided. Then, more quietly, he introduced his nephew to his associates in the curious business of which he was a partner.
And it was in this way that the boy first met the people in his uncle’s office—an office and people who were, during the years that followed, and in the course of hundreds of visits, to become a part of the fabric of his life—so hauntingly real, so strangely familiar that in the years that followed he could forget none of them, remember everything just as it was.
These offices, which he saw for the first time that day, were composed of
