d man in southwest
Texas. And he always made good whenever he bragged; and the more noise
he made the more dangerous he was. In the story papers it is always
the quiet, mild-mannered man with light blue eyes and a low voice who
turns out to be really dangerous; but in real life and in this story
such is not the case. Give me my choice between assaulting a large,
loudmouthed rough-houser and an inoffensive stranger with blue eyes
sitting quietly in a corner, and you will see something doing in the
corner every time.

King James, as I intended to say earlier, was a fierce,
two-hundred-pound, sunburned, blond man, as pink as an October
strawberry, and with two horizontal slits under shaggy red eyebrows
for eyes. On that day he wore a flannel shirt that was tan-coloured,
with the exception of certain large areas which were darkened by
transudations due to the summer sun. There seemed to be other clothing
and garnishings about him, such as brown duck trousers stuffed into
immense boots, and red handkerchiefs and revolvers; and a shotgun
laid across his saddle and a leather belt with millions of cartridges
shining in it--but your mind skidded off such accessories; what held
your gaze was just the two little horizontal slits that he used for
eyes.

This was the man that old man Ellison met on the trail; and when you
count up in the baron's favour that he was sixty-five and weighed
ninety-eight pounds and had heard of King James's record and that he
(the baron) had a hankering for the _vita simplex_ and had no gun with
him and wouldn't have used it if he had, you can't censure him if I
tell you that the smiles with which the troubadour had filled his
wrinkles went out of them and left them plain wrinkles again. But he
was not the kind of baron that flies from danger. He reined in the
mile-an-hour pony (no difficult feat), and saluted the formidable
monarch.

King James expressed himself with royal directness. "You're that old
snoozer that's running sheep on this range, ain't you?" said he. "What
right have you got to do it? Do you own any land, or lease any?"

"I have two sections leased from the state," said old man Ellison,
mildly.

"Not by no means you haven't," said King James. "Your lease expired
yesterday; and I had a man at the land office on the minute to take it
up. You don't control a foot of grass in Texas. You sheep men have got
to git. Your time's up. It's a cattle country, and there ain't any
room in it fo