Читать книгу A Battle for Right; Or, A Clash of Wits онлайн

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The orchestra, consisting of two violins, a cornet, and piano, half hidden in foliage disposed in front of the stage, seemed to be uncertain what to play. The leader, his violin in his left hand, reached over the footlights and took a few sheets of music from the girl.

“What do you think o’ that?” chuckled old Joe Stokes. “She didn’t know enough to give her music to the leader before she come on! She didn’t have no rehearsal, neither. I should have seen her if she had, and I never clapped my lamps on her before.”

There was a well-built young man, with a cap pulled over his eyes, sitting by himself at a table near that at which the two tough-looking citizens who had commented on the girl sprawled.

The young man had on the high-laced boots commonly worn in country places—East, as well as West—and his sack coat looked as if he were not at all careful of his clothes, for there were marks of clay, sand and mud on them, as well as indications that he had come in contact with the bark of trees, more or less roughly.