And the boy, stammering awed but grateful thanks, picked up his valise hastily and started off to do the bidding of the tall Olympian. As he went down the path he heard again the low, deep, winning laugh, and, without turning his head, he knew that Olympian was standing there, following him with his piercing, smoky eyes, with his hands arched on his hips in that gesture of instinctive and unconscious grace.
Monk Webber would never be able to forget that incident. The memory of it burned in his brain as vividly as ever after more than twenty years. For he was that skinny, adolescent boy, and the Olympian, although he did not know it then, was the magnificent creature known to his earthly comrades as Jim Randolph.
YEARS LATER, MONK would still affirm that James Heyward Randolph was the handsomest man he ever saw. Jim was a creature of such power and grace that the memory of him later on was like a legend. He was, alas, a legend even then.
He was a man who had done brilliant and heroic things, and he looked the part. It seemed that he had been especially cast by nature to fulfill the most exacting requirements of the writers of romantic fiction. He was a Richard Harding Davis hero, he was the hero of a book by Robert W. Chambers, he was a Jeffery Farnol paragon, he was all the Arrow collar young men one had ever seen in pictures, all the football heroes from the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, he was all of these rolled into one, and he was something more than all of these. His beauty was conformed by a real manliness, his physical perfection by a natural and incomparable grace, the handsome perfection and regularity of his features by qualities of strength, intelligence, tenderness, and humor that all the heroes of romantic fiction can counterfeit but do not attain.
Jim was a classic type of the tall, young American. He was perhaps a fraction under six feet and three inches tall, and he weighed 192 pounds. He moved with a grace and power that were incomparable. Whenever one saw him walking along the street, one got an overwhelming impression that he was weaving and “picking his holes” behind the interference, and that he was just about to shake loose around the ends in a touchdown gallop. He moved by a kind of superb pacing rhythm that suggested nothing on earth so much as a race horse coming from the paddocks down to the starting line. He paced upon the balls of his feet, as lightly and delicately as a cat, and there was always the suggestion that his powerful arms and hands were delicately pawing the air, a gesture not pronounced but unmistakable, and, like his walk, his carriage, everything about him, suggested a tremendous catlike power and speed—pent, trembling, geared for action, ready to be unleashed, like the leap of a panther.
Everything about him had this fine-drawn, poised, and nervous grace of a thoroughbred animal. The predominant characteristics were leanness, grace, and speed. His head was well-shaped, rather small. He had black hair, which was closely cropped. His ears also were well-shaped and set close to the head. His eyes were grey and very deep-set, under heavy eyebrows. In moments of anger or deep feeling of any kind his eyes could darken smokily, almost into black. Ordinarily they had the luminous grey potency, the sense of tremendous latent vitality, of a cat. This well-shaped head was carried proudly upon a strong, lean neck and a pair of wide, powerful shoulders. The arms were long, lean, powerfully muscled; the hands also were large and powerful. The whole body was shaped like a wedge: the great shoulders sloped down to a narrow waist, then the figure widened out somewhat to the lean hips, then was completed with the ranging power and grace of the long legs. Jim’s speech and voice also maintained and developed the impression of catlike power. His voice was rather soft and low, very Southern, a little husky, full of latent passion, tenderness, or humor, and indicative, as only a voice can be, of the tremendous pantheresque vitality of the man.