Read "The Tempting of Tavernake" by E. Phillips Oppenheim online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
One night Tavernake began to laugh. He had grown a long brown beard and the hair was over his ears. He was wearing a gray flannel shirt, a handkerchief tied around his neck, and a pair of worn riding breeches held up by a belt. He had kicked his boots off at the end of a long day, and was lying in the moonlight before a fire of pine logs, whose smoke went straight to the star-hung sky. No word had been spoken for the last hour. Tavernake's fit of mirth came with as little apparent reason as the puffs of wind which every now and then stole down from the mountain side and made faint music in the virgin forests.
Pritchard turned over on his side and looked at him. Cigars had for many weeks been an unknown thing, and he was smoking a corn-cob pipe full of coarse tobacco.