The more the young man studied the elder man’s face, the better he liked it.  Figure to yourself a Don Quixote not born in Spain but in South Carolina, not clothed in absurd armor but in a linen suit, and who rode, not on Rosinante but in a motor-car, and you ll have a fair enough idea of the old gentleman who popped into Peter’s house that Sunday night.

Peter asked no questions.  He sat back, and waited for such information as his guest chose to convey.  He felt bewildered, and at the same time happy.  He who was so alone of a sudden found that he possessed this relative, and it seemed to him almost too good to be true.  That the relative had never before noticed his existence, that he was supposed to be a trifler and a ne’er-do-weel, didn’t cloud Peter’s joy.

His relative put his feet on a chair, lighted and smoked a cutty, and presently unbosomed himself, jerkily, and with some reluctance.  His wife Milly—­and whenever he mentioned her name the melancholy in his brown eyes deepened—­had been dead some twelve years now.  They had had no children.  He had wandered from south to west, from Mexico and California and Yucatan to Alaska, always going to strike it lucky and always missing it.  To the day of her death Milly had stood by, loyally, lovingly, unselfishly, his one prop and solace, his perfect friend and comrade.  There was never, he said, anybody like her.  And Milly died.  Died poor, in a shack in a mining-town.

He had done something of everything, from selling patent medicines to taking up oil and mining-claims.  He couldn’t stay put.  He really didn’t care what happened to him, and so of course nothing happened to him.  That’s the way things are.

Three years after Milly’s death he had fallen in with Feilding, the Englishman.  Feilding was almost on his last legs when the two met, and Champneys nursed him back to life.  The silent, rather surly Englishman refused to be separated from the man who, he said, had saved his life, and the two struck up a partnership of mutual misfortune.  They tramped and starved and worked together, until Feilding died, leaving to his partner his sole possessions—­a mining-claim and a patent-medicine recipe.  He had felt about down and out, the night Feilding died, for the Englishman was the one real friend he had made, the one person who loved him and whom he loved, after Milly.

But instead of his being down and out, the tide had even then turned for Chadwick Champneys.  His friendless wanderings were about done.  The mining-claim was worth a very great deal; and the patent medicine did at least some of the things claimed for it.  He took it to a certain firm, offering them two thirds of the first and half of the second year’s profits for handling the thing for him.  They closed with the offer, and from the very first the medicine was a money-maker.  It would always be a best-seller.