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frosty blue eyes of amazing keenness.
    Their owner was well above middle height and massively and robustly built. His shoulders were of great breadth, his arms long and powerful. He had a craggy eagle’s beak of a nose above a wide, tightly clamped mouth whose sternness was relieved by the numerous quirkings of the corners.A snowy bush of crinkly white hair frizzed back from a dome-shaped forehead. He nodded to Huck and spoke to him in a deep and resonant voice.
    “Hmm! Decided to come out of it at last, eh? How you feel?”
    “About as if I’d been dragged through a knothole and then hung on a barbed wire fence to dry,” Huck admitted. “Otherwise not so bad. Everything seems to be in working order.” He gingerly flexed his arms and legs and swiveled his head from side to side.
    The big oldster grunted. “You’re lucky,” he said. “There were rocks and chunks of iron and big timbers piled all over the place where we found you. When you were knocked down, you sort rolled under the bulge of the cliff. Reckon that saved you.”
    Huck sat up abruptly, despite the protests of a brand-new set of pains that his sudden movement stabbed through him.
    “Old Tom—Old Tom Gaylord”—he panted, fighting the nausea that crawled around the pit of his stomach—“did he—”
    “You can’t kill a hobo,” the old man growled. “He’s in the bunk up ahead of you with a couple of broken ribs and a badly bruised chest and back. Keep him laid up for a month or two, I guess. He owes you his life. I heard the whole story from the freight conductor and that miner-fellow.”
    Huck sank back onto his pillow, much relieved. The old man gazed at him with those canny eyes.
    “Where you heading, son?” he asked.
    “The mines over to Esmeralda,” Huck replied,remembering Lank Mason’s destination. “Expect to find work there,” he added, recalling abruptly that the lantern used by himself and his companions was responsible for the fire and subsequent explosion.
    The old man might be a member of the railroad police and as such would doubtless act harshly toward wandering knights of the road with no legitimate destination in view. Honest workmen in search of employment he might regard in a less gloomy light.
    The old man’s gaze fixed upon Huck’s sinewy right hand, the burns grease-smeared, which lay palm upward upon the rough blanket.
    “Those callouses don’t look like the kind that come from a pick and shovel,” he remarked dryly, adding with meaning, “particularly those on the thumb and first finger.”
    Huck’s gray eyes met the cold blue ones steadily.
    “I haven’t anything to hide,” he said quietly. “Yeah, those across the palm were made by a grass rope, and that one on the thumb—well, because a man practices the draw doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a cow-thief or a dry-gulcher.”
    “Not necessarily,” the old man agreed. “even if it is mighty unusual to find a cowboy riding a manifest freight and heading for a mining camp. Well, that’s your business, and what you did to save that old fellow was commendable—and smart.”
    “Where am I—and where’s Lank?” Huck asked.
    “You are in a wreck-train bunk-car,” the old manreplied. “And the big miner—that’s Lank, I guess—is helping the crew clean up the mess.
    “We’ll be rolling in about half an hour, now,” he added, “and this outfit is headed for Esmeralda, the mining town. If you decide to stay there for a spell and—work, you might drop in and see me when I come back this way next month.”
    Before Huck could form a question, the old man turned and passed through the end door of the car.
    A moment later a capped and aproned Negro stuck a shining black face through the doorway and flashed a dazzling set of ivories at the cowboy.
    “Howdy, boss, and how you feelin’?” he said. “Figurate you could do with a right smart helpin’ of po’k chops and fried ‘taters ‘bout now. Like to hab me bring the vittles in here to