he
next settlement, but he did not care to appear openly at the "Gulch
Hotel." He was a man of thirty, with soft, pleasing features and a
singular litheness of movement, which, combined with a nut-brown, gypsy
complexion, at first suggested a foreigner. But his dialect, to the
colonel's ears, was distinctly that of New England, and to this was
added a puritanical and sanctimonious drawl. "He looked," said the
colonel in after years, "like a blank light mulatter, but talked like a
blank Yankee parson." For all that, he was acceptable to his host, who
may have felt that his reminiscences of his plantation on the James
River were palling on Buena Vista ears, and was glad of his new auditor.
It was an advertisement, too, of the hotel, and a promise of its future
fortunes. "Gentlemen having propahty interests at the Gulch, sah, prefer
to stay at Buena Vista with another man of propahty, than to trust to
those new-fangled papah-collared, gingerbread booths for traders that
they call 'hotels' there," he had remarked to some of "the boys." In his
preoccupation with the new guest, he also became a little neglectful
of his old chum and dependent, Larry Hawkins. Nor was this the only
circumstance that filled the head of that shiftless loyal retainer
of the colonel with bitterness and foreboding. Polly Swinger--the
scornfully indifferent, the contemptuously inaccessible, the coldly
capricious and petulant--was inclined to be polite to the stranger!

The fact was that Polly, after the fashion of her sex, took it into
her pretty head, against all consistency and logic, suddenly to make
an exception to her general attitude towards mankind in favor of one
individual. The reason-seeking masculine reader will rashly conclude
that this individual was the CAUSE as well as the object; but I am
satisfied that every fair reader of these pages will instinctively know
better. Miss Polly had simply selected the new guest, Mr. Starbuck, to
show OTHERS, particularly Larry Hawkins, what she COULD do if she were
inclined to be civil. For two days she "fixed up" her distracting hair
at him so that its silken floss encircled her head like a nimbus; she
tucked her oval chin into a white fichu instead of a buttonless collar;
she appeared at dinner in a newly starched yellow frock! She talked
to him with "company manners;" said she would "admire to go to San
Francisco," and asked if he knew her old friends the Fauquier girls
from "Faginia." The colonel w