This Boone, whose eyes, set in a freckled face, were as blue as overhead skies and deep with a fathomless discontent, had neither past nor future to contemplate--only a consuming hunger for a life less desolate. That of his people was unaltered--save for a lapse into piteous human lethargy--from the days when the other Boone had come on moccasined feet to win the West--for they were the offspring of the stranded; the heirs of the lost. Over all the high, hunched steepness of the ranges, Autumn had wandered with a palette of high colour and a brush of frost, splashing out the summer's sun-burned green with champagne yellow, burgundy-red and claret-crimson. To the nostrils, too, there floated with the thistledown, hints of bursting ripe fox-grapes and apples ready for the cider press. Countless other times Boone had sat here on this top-rail in his hodden-gray clothes and his slate-gray despair, making the same plaint, and knowing that only a miracle would ever bring around the road's turning anything less commonplace than a yoke of oxen or a native as drab as the mule he straddled. Yet as the boy capped his lamentation with a sigh that seemed to struggle up from the depths of his being, a breeze whispered along the mountain sides; the crisp leaves stirred to a tinkle like low laughter and there materialized a horseman who was in no wise to be confused with ordinary travellers in these parts. Boone Wellver caught his breath in a gasp of surprise and interest, and a low whistle sounded between his white teeth. "Lord o' Mercy," breathed the urchin, "hit's a furriner! Now I wonder who is he?" The stranger was mounted on a mule whose long ears flapped dejectedly and whose shamble had in it the flinch of galled withers, but the man in the saddle sat as if he had a charger under him--and it was this indefinable declaration of bearing that the boy saw and which, at first glance, fired his imagination. The traveller's face was bronzed and the moustache and imperial, trimmed in the fashion of the Third Napoleon's court, were only beginning to lose their sandy colour under a dominance of gray. The eyes--though now they were weary with travel and something more fundamental, too, than physical fatigue--were luminous of quality and a singularly clear gray of colour. They were such eyes as could be dogged and stern as flint or deep and bafflingly gentle like mossy waters. Covering the bony flanks of the mule and bulging grotesquely to port and starboard, hung capacious canvas saddle pockets--and as the stranger drew rein the boy's eyes dwelt with candid inquisitiveness upon them. Out of the cavernous maw of one of these receptacles protruded the corner of a tin dispatch box and fastened to a cantle ring behind the saddle was a long, slender object in a water-proof covering laced at the top.