Sublime

Quarrier raised his eyebrows, as if to try them out. When Moon lifted his head, a near smile came to his lips; he actually gave a bubbly cough of laughter. “Martin Quarrier, evangelist,” he said, “martyred by savages in the service of the Lord.” He looked pleadingly at Moon. “Yes,” Moon said, turning his head away.

He was like a farmer trying to convince a sly mule that the way to the feed house went through the plow fields.

Atwater had a short man’s emphatic, shoulder inflected walk.

“I’m a simple man who was brought up by a complicated man. So I have mannerisms and so on. Vocabulary. People can be misled.”

He was treated with a certain deference as one who had got onto terms with life beyond what his years could account for.

The sequestering of the big Butte market was duck soup for the aggressive Hill and allowed him to play the role that would make him a legend: forcing competitiveness on a rigged market.