“And he says he’s got maturity,” Barker muttered. “I’ve known him since seventy-nine, and he’s kept about eight years old right along.” The Governor was cross and sorry, and presently crosser. His jokes about Lin’s marriage came back to him and put him in a rage with the departed fool. “Yes, about eight. Or six,” said his Excellency, justifying himself by the past. For he had first known Lin, the boy of nineteen, supreme in length of limb and recklessness, breaking horses and feeling for an early mustache. Next, when the mustache was nearly accomplished, he had mended the boy’s badly broken thigh at Drybone. His skill (and Lin’s spotless health) had wrought so swift a healing that the surgeon overflowed with the pride of science, and over the bandages would explain the human body technically to his wild-eyed and flattered patient. Thus young Lin heard all about tibia, and comminuted, and other glorious new words, and when sleepless would rehearse them. Then, with the bone so nearly knit that the patient might leave the ward on crutches to sit each morning in Barker’s room as a privilege, the disobedient child of twenty-one had slipped out of the hospital and hobbled hastily to the hog ranch, where whiskey and variety waited for a languishing convalescent. Here he grew gay, and was soon carried back with the leg refractured. Yet Barker’s surgical rage was disarmed, the patient was so forlorn over his doctor’s professional chagrin. [Illustration: Border] “I suppose it ain’t no better this morning, Doc?” he had said, humbly, after a new week of bed and weights. “Your right leg’s going to be shorter. That’s all.” “Oh, gosh! I’ve been and spoiled your comminuted fee-mur! Ain’t I a son-of-a-gun?” You could not chide such a boy as this; and in time’s due course he had walked jauntily out into the world with legs of equal length, after all, and in his stride the slightest halt possible. And Doctor Barker had missed the child’s conversation. To-day his mustache was a perfected thing, and he in the late end of his twenties. [Illustration: Border] “He’ll wake up about noon to-morrow in a dive, without a cent,” said Barker. “Then he’ll come back on a freight and begin over again.” III A Transaction in Boot-Blacking [Illustration: Border] [Illustration: Border] [Illustration: Border]