who was in no wise to be confused with
ordinary travellers in these parts. Boone Wellver caught his breath in a
gasp of surprise and interest, and a low whistle sounded between his
white teeth.

"Lord o' Mercy," breathed the urchin, "hit's a furriner! Now I wonder
who is he?"

The stranger was mounted on a mule whose long ears flapped dejectedly
and whose shamble had in it the flinch of galled withers, but the man
in the saddle sat as if he had a charger under him--and it was this
indefinable declaration of bearing that the boy saw and which, at first
glance, fired his imagination.

The traveller's face was bronzed and the moustache and imperial, trimmed
in the fashion of the Third Napoleon's court, were only beginning to
lose their sandy colour under a dominance of gray.

The eyes--though now they were weary with travel and something more
fundamental, too, than physical fatigue--were luminous of quality and a
singularly clear gray of colour. They were such eyes as could be dogged
and stern as flint or deep and bafflingly gentle like mossy waters.

Covering the bony flanks of the mule and bulging grotesquely to port and
starboard, hung capacious canvas saddle pockets--and as the stranger
drew rein the boy's eyes dwelt with candid inquisitiveness upon them.
Out of the cavernous maw of one of these receptacles protruded the
corner of a tin dispatch box and fastened to a cantle ring behind the
saddle was a long, slender object in a water-proof covering laced at the
top.

At sight of that, Boone's eyes livened yet more, for he recognized the
shrouded shape though it was a thing almost as foreign to his world as
starlight is to the floor of the sea. Once he had been to Marlin Town on
a troubled Court day when a detachment of militia had stood guard in the
square to overawe warring factions and avert bloodshed. Their failure to
do so is another story, but their commanding officer had worn a sabre,
and now with a stirring excitement the boy divined that, this "qu'ar
contraption" dangling at the newcomer's back was nothing less portentous
than a sword!

Straightway the drab curtain of life's unrelief was rent for Boone
Wellver, and shot through with gleaming filaments of wonderment and
imaginative speculation. Here, of a sudden, came Romance on horseback,
and what matter that the horse was a mule?

"Son," he said in a kindly manner, "I'm bound for Cyrus Spradling's
house, and I begin to suspect that I must have lost