Those eyes began at the feet, took in the straight waistline, the well-knit shoulders. Bob weighed a hundred and eighty and looked as though he were put together to stay. For a moment Noah Ezekiel studied the friendly mouth, the resolute nose, the frank brown eyes; but not until they concentrated on the tangled mop of dark hair did a light dawn on the hill billy's face. "Well, I'll be durned!" The exclamation was deep and soul-satisfying, and he held out his hand. "If you ain't Fiddlin' Bob Rogeen, I'll eat my hat!" "Save your hat." Bob met the recognition with a friendly grin. "I never saw you but once," reflected Noah Ezekiel, "and that was the Sunday at Mt. Pisgah when my dad lambasted you in his sermon for fiddlin' for the dance Saturday night." "That sermon," Bob's smile was still a little rueful, "lost me the best job I had ever had." "Oh, well," consoled the hill billy, "if you hadn't lost it somethin' might have fell on you. That's what I always think when I have to move on." And he repeated with a nonchalant air a nonsensical hill parody: _I eat when I'm hungry, I drink when I'm dry, And if a tree don't fall on me I'll live till I die._ Then his eyes veered round to Bob's fiddle lying to one side on the grass. "I notice," he grinned, "dad did not convert you." "No," said Bob, "but he cured me--almost. I've only played the thing twice since." Rogeen picked up his fiddle and started for his horse. "Well, so long, Noah. You've got a nice place to work out here." His eyes swept almost covetously over the five-thousand-acre ranch, level as a floor, not a stump or a stone. "If I had this ranch I'd raise six thousand bales of cotton a year, or know the reason why." "That ain't what the last fellow said," remarked the hill billy, grinningly. "Reedy Jenkins was out yesterday figuring on buyin' the lease; and he said: 'If I had it--I'd raise the rent.'" CHAPTER II Bob was out in front of the hardware store dressed in a woollen shirt and overalls, and bareheaded, setting up a cotton planter, when an old gentleman in a linen duster, who had been pacing restlessly up and down the walk like a distant relative waiting for the funeral procession to start, stopped on the sidewalk to watch him work. Whether it was the young man's appearance, his whistling at his work or merely the way he used his hands that attracted the old gentleman was not certain. But after a moment he remarked in a crabbedly friendly tone: "Young man, you know your business."