It would have seemed ruminative, the
stare, had his eyes been softer or had he blinked; as it was, his face
was set and trance-like.
"Have you been in the country long?" St. Vincent asked, endeavoring to
make conversation.
Borg turned his sullen-black eyes upon him, and seemed to look into him
and through him and beyond him, and, still regarding him, to have
forgotten all about him. It was as though he pondered some great and
weighty matter--probably his sins, the correspondent mused nervously,
rolling himself a cigarette. When the yellow cube had dissipated
itself in curling fragrance, and he was deliberating about rolling a
second, Borg suddenly spoke.
"Fifteen years," he said, and returned to his tremendous cogitation.
Thereat, and for half an hour thereafter, St. Vincent, fascinated,
studied his inscrutable countenance. To begin with, it was a massive
head, abnormal and top-heavy, and its only excuse for being was the
huge bull-throat which supported it. It had been cast in a mould of
elemental generousness, and everything about it partook of the
asymmetrical crudeness of the elemental. The hair, rank of growth,
thick and unkempt, matted itself here and there into curious splotches
of gray; and again, grinning at age, twisted itself into curling locks
of lustreless black--locks of unusual thickness, like crooked fingers,
heavy and solid.
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