tor, each of whom was made feel himself to be the last one squeezed in through the narrow door of a rare opportunity by the senator's personal regard.
At that time, some five years before the opening of this story, young Edgar Barrett, glowing with the romance that this new venture seemed to bring to the family's door, was for quitting college, taking train for Wyoming, and setting up in the wildly adventurous life of cowboy, such as it was in those days, and generally is yet, from a distance believed to be.
No, said Barrett senior. Take four years in the navy to make a man of him, then go his way as he might choose. Into the navy the young man went, dutiful as always, cheerful according to his way. In the first year of his enlistment his father died, leaving shares in the Elk Mountain Cattle Company instead of insurance. Sixty shares of the company's stock he left his family, representing an investment of sixty thousand dollars. What percentage of the whole capitalization this was, young Barrett did not know. Whether a thousand or ten thousand shares had been sold, he never had been able to learn. Events of the past two or three years had confirmed him in his growing suspicion that the shares were not worth sixty cents.
Whether the stockholders in Nearing's company had been led deliberately into a shearing, or whether vindictive nature and outlawed man and beast had combined to work the failure of the enterprise, Barrett had journeyed into that land to learn. He was determined to get to the bottom of it, and find out whether there
