Page:Roads of Destiny (1909).djvu/273

 The commissioner hesitated at the end of his best bow, with his hand in the bosom of his double-breasted “frock.” Truth at last conquered.

“Well, no, ma’am. I am not the governor. I have the honour to be Commissioner of Insurance, Statistics, and History. Is there anything, ma’am, I can do for you? Won’t you have a chair, ma’am?”

The lady subsided into the chair handed her, probably from purely physical reasons. She wielded a cheap fan—last token of gentility to be abandoned. Her clothing seemed to indicate a reduction almost to extreme poverty. She looked at the man who was not the governor, and saw kindliness and simplicity and a rugged, unadorned courtliness emanating from a countenance tanned and toughened by forty years of outdoor life. Also, she saw that his eyes were clear and strong and blue. Just so they had been when he used them to skim the horizon for raiding Kiowas and Sioux. His mouth was as set and firm as it had been on that day when he bearded the old lion Sam Houston himself, and defied him during that season when secession was the theme. Now, in bearing and dress, Luke Coonrod Standifer endeavoured to do credit to the important arts and sciences of Insurance, Statistics, and History. He had abandoned the careless dress of his country home. Now, his broad-brimmed black slouch hat, and his long-tailed “frock” made him not the least imposing of the official family, even if his office was reckoned to stand at the tail of the list.

“You wanted to see the governor, ma’am?” asked the