Perhaps no better opportunity will present itself for a study of our hero and his companions and so we will make the most of it. Wayne Sloan was seventeen years old; to be exact, seventeen years and nineteen days. It had been the arrival of his seventeenth birthday that had decided him to cast off the yoke of thraldom and become his own master. He was a capable-looking youth, fairly large for his age. He had wide shoulders and carried himself straightly, a fact largely due, I fancy, to many hours spent in the saddle in his younger days. After the death of his mother, which had occurred four years ago, there had been neither saddle nor horse for him, nor, had there been a horse, would there have been opportunity for riding. His stepfather had his own notions regarding the proper occupations for a boy, notions that were at wide variance with Wayne’s. Handsome the boy was not, but you would have called him nice-looking. You’d have liked his eyes, which were so deeply brown that they seemed black, and the oval smoothness of his face which lacked the colourlessness of so many Southern faces. His hair was fully as dark as his eyes and as straight as an Indian’s, and just now, by reason of not having been cut for a month or so, was rather untidy about ears and neck. His nose was--well, it was just a plain, everyday affair, meriting no especial mention. And his mouth was no more remarkable. In fact, there was nothing to emphasise, from head to toes. He was just a nice-appearing, well-built Southern boy. At present his appearance was rather handicapped by his attire, for even the best of clothes will look shabby after nearly three weeks of dusty roads and dirty box cars, and Wayne’s apparel had not been anything to brag about in the beginning. A pair of gray trousers that only the most charitable would have called woolen, a vest of the same, a coat of blue serge, and a gray sweater comprised the more important part of his outfit. A black felt hat of the Fedora variety, ridiculously old-looking for the boyish face beneath, dark-blue cotton socks showing above a pair of rusty, dusty, scuffed-toed shoes, and a wispy blue string tie peering from under the wrinkled collar of a blue-and-white cotton shirt completed as much of his wardrobe as met the world’s gaze.