sets him at his left hand at table in the banquet hall. There ladies
smile upon him and applaud his songs and stories, while the Workers
bring boars' heads and flagons. If the Baron nods once or twice in his
carved oaken chair, he does not do it maliciously.

Old man Ellison welcomed the troubadour flatteringly. He had often
heard praises of Sam Galloway from other ranchmen who had been
complimented by his visits, but had never aspired to such an honour
for his own humble barony. I say barony because old man Ellison
was the Last of the Barons. Of course, Mr. Bulwer-Lytton lived too
early to know him, or he wouldn't have conferred that sobriquet
upon Warwick. In life it is the duty and the function of the Baron
to provide work for the Workers and lodging and shelter for the
Troubadours.

Old man Ellison was a shrunken old man, with a short, yellow-white
beard and a face lined and seamed by past-and-gone smiles. His ranch
was a little two-room box house in a grove of hackberry trees in the
lonesomest part of the sheep country. His household consisted of a
Kiowa Indian man cook, four hounds, a pet sheep, and a half-tamed
coyote chained to a fence-post. He owned 3,000 sheep, which he ran
on two sections of leased land and many thousands of acres neither
leased nor owned. Three or four times a year some one who spoke his
language would ride up to his gate and exchange a few bald ideas with
him. Those were red-letter days to old man Ellison. Then in what
illuminated, embossed, and gorgeously decorated capitals must have
been written the day on which a troubadour--a troubadour who,
according to the encyclopædia, should have flourished between the
eleventh and the thirteenth centuries--drew rein at the gates of his
baronial castle!