CHAPTER II

SYLVESTER HUDSON COMES FOR HIS PICTURE


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