the score of cowboys still intently and silently watched.

Hardman Pool awoke. The next out-breath, expected of the long
rhythm, did not take place. Neither did the white, long moustache
rise up. Instead, the cheeks, under the whiskers, puffed; the
eyelids lifted, exposing blue eyes, choleric and fully and
immediately conscious; the right hand went out to the half-smoked
pipe beside him, while the left hand reached the matches.

"Get me my gin and milk," he ordered, in Hawaiian, of the little
maid, who had been startled into a tremble by his awaking.

He lighted the pipe, but gave no sign of awareness of the presence
of his waiting retainers until the tumbler of gin and milk had been
brought and drunk.

"Well?" he demanded abruptly, and in the pause, while twenty faces
wreathed in smiles and twenty pairs of dark eyes glowed luminously
with well-wishing pleasure, he wiped the lingering drops of gin and
milk from his hairy lips. "What are you hanging around for? What
do you want? Come over here."

Twenty giants, most of them young, uprose and with a great clanking
and jangling of spurs and spur-chains strode over to him. They
grouped before him in a semicircle, trying bashfully to wedge their
shoulders, one behind another's, their faces a-grin and apologetic,
and at the same time expressing a casual and unconscious
democraticness. In truth, to them Hardman Pool was more than mere
chief. He was elder brother, or father, or patriarch; and to all
of them he was related, in one way or another, according to