Back of his sallow, lantern-jawed face, Sylvester Hudson hid successfully, though without intention, all that was in him whether of good or ill.  Certainly he did not look his history.  He was stoop-shouldered, pensive-eyed, with long hands on which he was always turning and twisting a big emerald.  He dressed quietly, almost correctly, but there was always something a little wrong in the color or pattern of his tie, and he was too fond of brown and green mixtures which did not become his sallowness.  He smiled very rarely, and when he did smile, his long upper lip unfastened itself with an effort and showed a horizontal wrinkle halfway between the pointed end of his nose and the irregular, nicked row of his teeth.

Altogether, he was a gentle, bilious-looking sort of man, who might have been anything from a country gentleman to a moderately prosperous clerk.  As a matter of fact, he was the owner of a dozen small, not too respectable, hotels through the West, and had an income of nearly half a million dollars.  He lived in Millings, a town in a certain Far-Western State, where flourished the most pretentious and respectable of his hotels.  It had a famous bar, to which rode the sheep-herders, the cowboys, the ranchers, the dry-farmers of the surrounding country—­yes, and sometimes, thirstiest of all, the workmen from more distant oil-fields, a dangerous crew.  Millings at that time had not yielded to the generally increasing “dryness” of the West.  It was “wet,” notwithstanding its choking alkali dust; and the deep pool of its wetness lay in Hudson’s bar, The Aura.  It was named for a woman who had become his wife.

When Hudson came to New York he looked up his Eastern patrons, and it was one of these who, knowing Arundel’s need, encouraged the hotel-keeper in his desire to secure a “jim-dandy picture” for the lobby of The Aura and took him for the purpose to Marcus’s studio.  On that morning, hardly a fortnight before the artist’s death, Sheila was not at home.

Marcus, in spite of himself, was managed into a sale.  It was of an enormous canvas, covered weakly enough by a thin reproduction of a range of the Rockies and a sagebrush flat.  Mr. Hudson in his hollow voice pronounced it “classy.”  “Say,” he said, “put a little life into the foreground and that would please me.  It’s what I’m seekin’.  Put in an automobile meetin’ one of these old-time prairie schooners—­the old West sayin’ howdy to the noo.  That will tickle the trade.”  Mark, who was feeling weak and ill, consented wearily.  He sketched in the proposed amendment and Hudson approved with one of his wrinkled smiles.  He offered a small price, at which Arundel leapt like a famished hound.

When his visitors had gone, the painter went feverishly to work.  The day before his death, Sheila, under his whispered directions, put the last touches to the body of the “auto_m_obile.”

“It’s ghastly,” sighed the sick man, “but it will do—­for Millings.”  He turned his back sadly enough to the canvas, which stood for him like a monument to fallen hope.  Sheila praised it with a faltering voice, but he did not turn nor speak.  So she carried the huge picture out of his sight.