Now, as he rode on the last stage of his journey, and over the hilltops saw the smoke of the Foleys chimneys, his mind had once again fallen on the squatter’s name. Strange coincidence that after twenty-one years this name--a common one--should rise up uncomfortably in his path. He smiled bitterly to himself. Fate played strange tricks, and he felt, with a sense of shamed meanness, that he would have regarded the squatter with more leniency if he had borne any other name than Allen. CHAPTER II THE GRACEY BOYS The smell of wood smoke and supper was in the air as the Colonel rode down the main street of Foleys. Under the projecting roof that jutted from the second-story windows and made a species of rude arcade, men were sitting in the negligée of shirt sleeves, smoking and spitting in the cool of the evening. They hailed the new-comer with a word of greeting or a hand raised in salute to the side of a head where a hat brim should have been. The Colonel returned the salutations, and as Kit Carson paced through the red dust to where the drooping fringe of locust trees hid the façade of the hotel, looked curiously about him, noticing a slight stir of life, an appearance of reviving vitality in the once moribund camp. Foleys was not as dead as it had been four years ago. Fewer of the shop doors were boarded up; there were even new stores open. He was speculating on this when he threw himself off his horse in front of the hotel. The loungers on the piazza, dustered and shirt-sleeved men, let their tilted chairs drop to the front legs, and rose to greet him to a man. Anybody was an acquisition at Foleys, but Colonel Jim Parrish, with the rumor of bringing a lawsuit into their midst, was welcomed as the harbinger of a new era. They were all around him shaking hands when Forsythe, the proprietor, armed with a large feather duster, emerged from the front door. He cut the new arrival out from their midst and drew him into the hall. Here, dusting him vigorously, he shouted to Mrs. Forsythe to prepare a room, and between sweeps of the duster, inquired of him on the burning question of the squatter. “Come to fire old man Allen, eh?” he queried. “Got your work cut out for you with him.” “He’ll find he’s barked up the wrong tree this time,” said the Colonel grimly, “bringing me up from San Francisco on such a fool’s errand.” “It’s about the galliest proposition I’ve ever heard. But he’s that kind, drunk a lot of the time, and the rest of it tellin’ the boys round here what a great man he used to be. He was glad enough to get twenty-five dollars a month holdin’ down a small job in the assay office.” At this moment a door to the right opened, yielding a glimpse of a large bare dining-room set forth with neatly laid tables and decorated with hanging strands of colored paper. “Say,” said a female voice, “ain’t that Colonel Jim Parrish that just come down the street?”