s was
more or less impressed with the visitor's splendor. He wore exceedingly
tight trousers--checked trousers, and a coat cut grandly and
extravagantly in its fullness, a high wing collar, and a soup dish hat.
He was such a figure as the comic papers of the day were featuring as
the exquisite young man of the period.

Youth was in his countenance and lighted his black eyes. His oval,
finely featured face, his blemishless olive skin, his strong jaw and his
high, beautiful forehead, over which a black wing of hair hung
carelessly, gave him a distinction that brought even the child's eyes to
him. He was smiling pleasantly as he said,

"I'm Thomas Van Dorn--Mr. Adams, I believe?" he asked, and added as he
fastened his fresh young eyes upon the editor's, "you scarcely will
remember me--but you doubtless remember the day when father's hunting
party passed through town? Well--I've come to grow up with the country."

The editor rose, roughed his short, sandy beard and greeted the youth
pleasantly. "Mr. Daniel Sands sent me to you, Mr. Adams--to print a
professional card in your paper," said the young man. He pronounced them
"cahd" and "papuh" and smiled brightly as his quick eyes told him that
the editor was conscious of his eastern accent. While they were talking
business, locating the position of the card in the newspaper, the editor
noticed that the young man's eyes kept wandering to Mary Adams,
typesetting across the room. She was a comely woman just in her thirties
and Amos Adams finally introduced her. When he went out the Adamses
talked him over and agreed that he was an addition to the town.

Within a month he had formed a partnership with Joseph Calvin, the
town's eldest lawyer; and young Henry Fenn, who had been trying for a
year to buy a partnership with Calvin, was left to go it alone. So Henry
Fenn contented himself with forming a social partnership with his young
rival. And when the respectable Joseph Calvin was at home or considering
the affairs of the Methodist Sunday School of which he was
superintendent, young Mr. Fenn and young Mr. Van Dorn were rambling at
large over the town and the adjacent prairie, seeking such diversion as
young men in their exceedingly early twenties delight in: Mr. Riley's
saloon, the waters of the Wahoo, by moonlight, the melliferous strains
of "Larboard watch," the shot gun, the quail and the prairie chicken,
the quarterhorse, and the jackpot, the cocktail, the Indian pony, the