These things Carraway understood, yet as the man strode into the
room with open palm and a general air of bluff hospitality--as if
he had just been blown by some fresh strong wind across his
tobacco fields--the lawyer experienced a relief so great that the
breath he drew seemed a fit measure of his earlier foreboding.
For Fletcher outwardly was but the common type of farmer, after
all, with a trifle more intelligence, perhaps, than is met with
in the average Southerner of his class. "A plain man but honest,
sir," was what one expected him to utter at every turn. It was
written in the coarse open lines of his face, half-hidden by a
bushy gray beard; in his small sparkling eyes, now blue, now
brown; in his looselimbed, shambling movements as he crossed the
room. His very clothes spoke, to an acute observer, of a
masculine sincerity naked and unashamed--as if his large
coffee-spotted cravat would not alter the smallest fold to
conceal the stains it bore. Hale, hairy, vehement, not without a
quality of Rabelaisian humour, he appeared the last of all men
with whom one would associate the burden of a troubled
conscience.

"Sorry to have kept you--on my word I am," he began heartily;
"but to tell the truth, I thought thar'd be somebody in the house
with sense enough to show you to a bedroom. Like to run up now
for a wash before supper?"

It was what one expected of him, such a speech blurted in so
offhand a manner, and the lawyer could barely suppress a
threatening laugh.