“I come nex’ summer,” she said.

By-and-by Nicholas returned with a new parki and a pair of wonderful buckskin breeches—­not like anything worn by the Lower River natives, or by the coast-men either:  well cut, well made, and handsomely fringed down the outside of the leg where an officer’s gold stripe goes.

“Chaparejos!” screamed the Boy.  “Where’d you get ’em?”

“Ol’ Chief—­he ketch um.”

“They’re bully!” said the Boy, holding the despised rabbit-skin under his chin with both hands, and craning excitedly over it.  He felt that his fortunes were looking up.  Talk about a tide in the affairs of men!  Why, a tide that washes up to a wayfarer’s feet a pair o’ chaparejos like that—­well! legs so habited would simply have to carry a fella on to fortune.  He lay back on the sleeping-bench with dancing eyes, while the raw whisky hummed in his head.  In the dim light of seal-lamps vague visions visited him of stern and noble chiefs out of the Leather Stocking Stories of his childhood—­men of daring, whose legs were invariably cased in buck-skin with dangling fringes.  But the dashing race was not all Indian, nor all dead.  Famous cowboys reared before him on bucking bronchos, their leg-fringes streaming on the blast, and desperate chaps who held up coaches and potted Wells Fargo guards.  Anybody must needs be a devil of a fellow who went about in “shaps,” as his California cousins called chaparejos.  Even a peaceable fella like himself, not out after gore at all, but after an Orange Grove—­even he, once he put on—­He laughed out loud at his childishness, and then grew grave.  “Say, Nicholas, what’s the tax?”

“Hey?”

“How much?”

“Oh, your pardner—­he pay.”

“Humph!  I s’pose I’ll know the worst on settlin’-day.”

Then, after a few moments, making a final clutch at economy before the warmth and the whisky subdued him altogether: 

“Say, Nicholas, have you got—­hasn’t the Ol’ Chief got any—­less glorious breeches than those?”

“Hey?”

“Anything little cheaper?”

“Nuh,” says Nicholas.

The Boy closed his eyes, relieved on the whole.  Fate had a mind to see him in chaparejos.  Let her look to the sequel, then!

When consciousness came back it brought the sound of Yagorsha’s yarning by the fire, and the occasional laugh or grunt punctuating the eternal “Story.”

The Colonel was sitting there among them, solacing himself by adding to the smoke that thickened the stifling air.

Presently the Story-teller made some shrewd hit, that shook the Pymeut community into louder grunts of applause and a general chuckling.  The Colonel turned his head slowly, and blew out a fresh cloud:  “Good joke?”

In the pause that fell thereafter, Yagorsha, imperturbable, the only one who had not laughed, smoothed his lank, iron-gray locks down on either side of his wide face, and went on renewing the sinew open-work in his snow-shoe.