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 of his high station on the breast of his padded coat.

This was no grandee that stood waiting before his desk, to be sure: only a lank-limbed young fellow with a round black hat sitting rather soberly on his closely cut brown hair, one big hand holding the pen with a ready facility that betrayed more than a passing acquaintance with its use. The hat was dented all around the top of its crown, in the decorative style approved for such hats in that day, which was longer ago than yesterday, indeed.

No grandee, but a bold sketch that needed only the proper shading in and filling to make an acceptable man. Which was more to the liking of Ross MacKinnon than any number of ambassadors the courts of the earth could produce.

Plainly an unsophisticated young man who would not ask for a bath; a young man who had broken from his anchorage only a little while ago to sail out on the untried waters. MacKinnon knew the type well, so many of them came in that same manner of half-questioning trepidation seeking the romance of life in the short-grass country. It broke the spirit of many, and sent them back whence they came cowed, and heartless to venture forth again; and some it drew into its insidious wiles and debauched them, giving them draggled eyes. Only a few held a straight way to the thing they had come seeking in that country.

This lad looked like he might turn out one of the straight-going ones, MacKinnon thought, taking stock of him with shrewdly appraising eye.