His lank bones began to take on flesh, and his face rounded at the corners, and the eagerness of youth passed from him. He always looked more of a man than John Barclay. For Barclay was a man of enthusiasms, who occasionally liked to mouth a hard jaw-breaking "damn," and who followed his instincts with womanly faith in them--so that he became known as a man of impulse. But Hendricks' power was in repression, and in Sycamore Ridge they used to say that the only reason why Bob Hendricks grew a mustache was to chew it when people expected him to talk. It wasn't much of a mustache--a little blond fuzz about as heavy as his yellow eyebrows over his big inquiring blue eyes, and he once told Dolan that he kept it for a danger signal. When he found himself pulling at it, he knew he was nervous and should get out into the open. They tell a story in the Ridge to the effect that Hendricks started to run to a fire, and caught himself pulling at his mustache, and turned around and went out to the power-house instead. It was the only anecdote ever told of Hendricks after he was forty--for he was not a man about whom anecdotes would hang well, though the town is full of them about John Barclay. So Hendricks lived a strong reticent man, who succeeded in business though he was honest, and who won in politics by choosing his enemies from the kind of noisy men who make many mistakes, and let every one know it. The time came when he did not avoid Molly Brownwell; she felt that he was not afraid to see her in any circumstances, and that made her happy. Sometimes she went to him in behalf of one of her father's charges,--some poor devil who could not pay his note at the bank and keep the children in school, or some clerk or workman at the power-house who had been discharged. At such times they talked the matter in hand over frankly, and it ended by the man giving way to the woman, or showing her simply that she was wrong. Only once in nearly a score of years did a personal word pass between them. She had come to him for his signature to a petition for a pardon for a man whose family suffered while he was in the penitentiary. Hendricks signed the paper and handed it back to her, and his blue eyes were fixed impersonally upon her, and he smiled his curious, self-deprecatory smile and sighed, "As we forgive our debtors." Then he reached for a paper in his desk and seemed oblivious to her presence. No one else was near them, and the woman hesitated a moment before turning to go and repeated, "Yes, Bob--as we forgive our debtors." She tried to show him the radiance in her soul, but he did not look up and she went away. When she had gone, he pushed aside his work and sat for a moment looking into the street; he began biting his mustache, and rose, and went out of the bank and found some other work.