ALL that Boley Drumgoole had gathered in his long grazing across the range of life was an armful of old white whiskers. They were not much to behold, small adornment to wear; for they were beginning to turn yellow, like a weathered marble tombstone, or wool that has a rust in it, or old, dusty whiskers, indeed, that have strained tobacco smoke for more than fifty years.
"Uncle Boley," he was called, and he was not troubled at all over the things which he had missed in this world while his talents were being bent to the production of that beard, the biggest ever seen between the Missouri and the Cimarron. It was his mantle and his comforter; it would be his shroud. He buttoned it under his vest to keep the pleurisy out of his chest when the wind stood northeast and the wintry days were gray, turning it out with the first warm sun of March, like a crocus, vain of its endeavor to make a dun world bright.
Uncle Boley had been an unwilling widower for
