His Excellency left the rider sitting motionless, and forgot him at once in his own preoccupation.  He hastened upon his journey to the shops with the list, not in his pocket, but held firmly, like a plank in the imminence of shipwreck.  The Nellies and Susies pervaded his mind, and he struggled with the presentiment that in a day or two he would recall some omitted and wretchedly important child.  Quick hoof-beats made him look up, and Mr. McLean passed like a wind.  The Governor absently watched him go, and saw the pony hunch and stiffen in the check of his speed when Lin overtook his companions.  Down there in the distance they took a side street, and Barker rejoicingly remembered one more name and wrote it as he walked.  In a few minutes he had come to the shops, and met face to face with Mr. McLean.

“The boys are seein’ after my horse,” Lin rapidly began, “and I’ve got to meet ’em sharp at one.  We’re twelve weeks shy on a square meal, yu’ see, and this first has been a date from ’way back.  I’d like to—­” Here Mr. McLean cleared his throat, and his speech went less smoothly.  “Doc, I’d like just for a while to watch yu’ gettin’—­them monkeys, yu’ know.”

The Governor expressed his agreeable surprise at this change of mind, and was glad of McLean’s company and judgment during the impending selections.  A picture of a cow-puncher and himself discussing a couple of dolls rose nimbly in Barker’s mental eye, and it was with an imperfect honesty that he said, “You’ll help me a heap.”

And Lin, quite sincere, replied, “Thank yu’.”

So together these two went Christmasing in the throng.  Wyoming’s Chief Executive knocked elbows with the spurred and jingling waif, one man as good as another in that raw, hopeful, full-blooded cattle era, which now the sobered West remembers as the days of its fond youth.  For one man has been as good as another in three places—­Paradise before the Fall; the Rocky Mountains before the wire fence; and the Declaration of Independence.  And then this Governor, beside being young, almost as young as Lin McLean or the Chief Justice (who lately had celebrated his thirty-second birthday), had in his doctoring days at Drybone known the cow-puncher with that familiarity which lasts a lifetime without breeding contempt; accordingly he now laid a hand on Lin’s tall shoulder and drew him among the petticoats and toys.

Christmas filled the windows and Christmas stirred in mankind.  Cheyenne, not over-zealous in doctrine or litanies, and with the opinion that a world in the hand is worth two in the bush, nevertheless was flocking together, neighbor to think of neighbor, and every one to remember the children; a sacred assembly, after all, gathered to rehearse unwittingly the articles of its belief, the Creed and Doctrine of the Child.  Lin saw them hurry and smile among the paper fairies; they questioned and hesitated, crowded and made decisions, failed utterly to find the right thing, forgot and