t
far away. He looked pale.

It afforded Don Anastasio little satisfaction to find a young man not
more than twenty-two or three. Without his great coat the Southerner
proved lithe rather than stocky. There was even an elusive angular
effect to him. Yet the night before he had looked as wide and imposing
as the general of an army. His cheeks were smooth, but they were tight
and hard and brown from the weathering of sun and blizzard. His features
had that decisive cleanliness of line which makes for strong beauty in a
man. Evidently nature had molded them boyishly soft and refined at
first, but in the hardening of life, of a life such as his, they had
become rugged. Most of all, the face was unmistakably American. The
large mouth had that dry, whimsical set, and that sensitiveness to
twitching at the corners, which foretells a smile. The brown eyes
sparkled quietly, and contour and expression generally were those which
one may find on a Missourian, or a Texan, or on a man from Montana, or
even on a New Yorker born; but never, anywhere, except on an American.
Whatever is said to the contrary, the new Western race in its fusing of
many old ones has certainly produced not one but several peculiarly
American types, and Driscoll's was American. It was most so because it
had humor, virility, and the optimism that drives back despair and holds
forth hope for all races of men.

Murguia was right, his passenger seemed a boy. But war and four years of
hardest riding had meant more of age than lagging peace could ever hold.
Sometimes there flitted across the lad's face a vague melancholy, but
being all things rather than self-inspecting, he could never quite
locate the trouble, and would shake himself out of it with a sort of
comical wonder. Bitterness had even touched him the night before, as it
did many another Southerner on the eve of the Surrender. Yet the boy
part in him made such moods rare, and only passing at their worst. On
the other hand the same boy-part gave a vigor and a lustre to his
occupation, though that occupation was--fighting. He knew no other, and
in that the young animal worked off excess of animal life with a
refreshing gusto. Even his comrades, of desperado stripe that they were,
had dubbed him the Storm Centre. And so he was, in every tempest of
arms. The very joy of living--in killing, alas!--always flung him true
to the centre. But once there, he was like a calm and busy workman, and
had as little self