in. He regaled himself with fierce defiance, like a captive eagle,
and had no word in return for the generous importunities of the man
who was host to him in what evidently was a long-deferred meal.

Chadron paid the bill when the man at last finished packing his
internal cavities, and they went together into the hotel office which
adjoined the dining-room.

The office of this log hotel was a large, gaunt room, containing a few
chairs along the walls, a small, round table under the window with the
register upon it, a pen in a potato, and a bottle of ink with trickled
and encrusted sides. The broad fireplace was bleak and black,
blank-staring as a blind eye, and the sun reached through the window
in a white streak across the mottled floor.

There was the smell of old pipes, old furs, old guns, in the place,
and all of them were present to account for themselves and dispel any
shadow of mystery whatever--the guns on their pegs set in auger-holes
in the logs of the walls, the furs of wild beasts dangling from like
supports in profusion everywhere, and the pipes lying on the mantel
with stems hospitably extended to all unprovided guests. Some of them
had been smoked by the guests who had come and gone for a generation
of men.

The stranger stood at the manteltree and tried the pipes' capacity
with his thick-ended thumb, finding one at last to his requirements.
Tall as Saul Chadron stood on his own proper legs, the stranger at his
shoulder was a head above him. Seven feet he must have towered, his
crown within a few inches of the smoked beams across the ceiling, and
marvelously thin in the running up. It seemed that the wind must break
him some blustering day at that place in his long body where hunger,
or pain, or mischance had doubled him over in the past, and left him
creased. The strong light of the room found pepperings of gray in his
thick and long black hair.

Chadron himself was a gray man, with a mustache and beard like a
cavalier. His shrewd eyes were sharp and bright under heavy brows, his
brown face was toughened by days in the saddle through all seasons of
weather and wind. His shoulders were broad and heavy, and even now,
although not dressed for the saddle, there was an up-creeping in the
legs of his trousers, and a gathering at the knees of them, for they
were drawn down over his tall boots.

That was Chadron's way of doing the nice thing when he went abroad in
his buckboard. He had saddle manners and