The One Woman | Page 9

He laughed, kissed her, and hurried to catch the train for Babylon,

where Overman lived in his great country home.
Mark Overman was a bacholer of forty, noted for the fact that he had
but one eye and was so homely it was a joke. His friends said he was so
ugly it was fascinating, and he was constantly laughing about it himself.
He was a Wall Street banker, several times a millionaire, famed for his
wit, his wide reading, his brutally cynical views of society, and his
ridicule of modern philanthropy and Socialistic dreams.
He was a man of average height with the heavy-set, bulldog body, face
and neck, broad, powerful hands and big feet. He had an enormous
nose, shaggy eyebrows and a bristling black moustache. But the one
striking peculiarity about him was his missing right eye. The large
heavy eyelid was drooped and closed tightly over the sightless socket,
which seemed to have sunk deep into his head. This cavern on one side
of his face gave to the other eye a strange power. When he looked at
you, it gleamed a fierce steady blaze like the electric headlight of an
engine. How he lost that eye was a secret he guarded with grim silence,
and no one was ever known to ask him twice.
Though five years older, he was Gordon's classmate at Wabash
College.
Overman had always scorned the suggestion of an artificial eye. He
swore he would never stick a piece of glass in his head to deceive fools.
He used to tell Gordon that he was the only one-eyed man in New York
who had the money to buy a glass eye and didn't do it.
"I prefer life's grim little joke to stand as it is," he said, as he snapped
his big jaws together and twisted the muscles of his mouth into a sneer.
He had a habit, when he closed an emphatic speech, of twisting the
muscles of his mouth in that way. When animated in talk, he was the
incarnation of disobedience, defiance, scorn, success.
Two things he held in special pride--hatred for women and a passionate
love for game-cocks. He allowed no woman on his place in any
capacity, and, by the sounds day and night, he kept at least a thousand
roosters. He would drop the profoundest discussion of philosophy or

economics at the mention of a chicken, and with a tender smile plunge
into an endless eulogy of his pets.
Gordon found him in a chicken yard fitting gaffs on two cocks.
"Caught in the act!" he cried.
"Well, who cares? They've got to fight it out. It's in 'em. They're full
brothers, too. Hatched the same day. They never scrapped in their lives
till yesterday, when I brought a new pullet and put her in the
neighbouring yard. They both tried to make love to her through the
wire fence at the same time, and they were so busy crowing and
strutting and showing off to this pullet they ran into each other and
began to fight. Now one must die, and I'm just fixing these little steel
points on for them so the function can be performed decently. I'm a
man of fine feelings."
"You're a brute when you let them kill one another with gaffs."
"Nonsense. The fighting instinct is elemental in all animal
life--two-legged and four-legged. Animals fight as inevitably as they
breathe. You can trace the progress of man by the evolution of his
weapons--the stone, the spear, the bow and arrow, the sword, the gun."
"Well, you're not going to have the fight this morning. Put up those
inventions of the devil and come into the house."
"All right. You're a parson; I'll not allow them to fight. I'll just chop the
head off of one and let you eat him for dinner." Overman grinned, and
pierced Gordon with his gleaming eye.
"It would be more sensible than the exhibition of brutality you were
preparing."
"Not from the rooster's point of view, or mine. I love chickens. If I tried
to eat one it would choke me. But I can see your mouth watering now,
looking at that fat young pullet over there, dreaming of the dinner hour
when you expect to smash her beautiful white breast between your

cannibal jaws. Funny men, preachers!"
Gordon laughed. "After all, you may be right. Our deepest culture is
about skin deep. Scratch any of us with the right tool and you'll find a
savage."
They strolled into the library and sat down. It was the largest and
best-furnished room in the house. Its lofty ceiling was frescoed in
sectional panels by a great artist. Its walls were covered as high as the
arm could reach with loaded bookshelves, and alcove doors opened
every ten