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
